Tombaugh had known it was there; calculations showing similar distortions in the orbital paths of Neptune and Uranus had made Pluto not just a possibility but a necessity. Still, to know a thing was there, even to know what it was ... that did not detract from the fascination of actually seeing it for the first time. He let go of the switch and handed the glass back to Pop. 'Yeah,' he said to his father. 'It's what you think it is.' His voice was as flat as ... as flat as the things in that Polaroid world, he supposed, and he felt an urge to laugh. He kept the sound inside, not because it would have been inappropriate to laugh (although he supposed it would have been) but because the sound would have come out sounding ... well . . . flat. Pop waited and when it became clear to him they were going to need a nudge, he said 'Well, don't keep me hoppin from one foot to the other! What the hell is it?' Kevin had felt reluctant to tell him before, and he felt reluctant now. There was no reason for it, but Stop being so goddamned dumb! He helped you when you needed helping, no matter how he earns his dough. Tell him and bum the pictures and let's get out of here before all those clocks start striking five. Yes. If he was around when that happened, he thought it would be the final touch; he would just go completely bananas and they could cart him away to juniper Hill, raving about real dogs in Polaroid worlds and cameras that took the same picture over and over again except not quite. 'The Polaroid camera was a birthday present,' he heard himself saying in that same dry voice. 'What it's wearing around its neck was another one.' Pop slowly pushed his glasses up onto his bald head and squinted at Kevin. 'I don't guess I'm followin you, son.' 'I have an aunt,' Kevin said. 'Actually she's my greataunt, but we're not supposed to call her that, because she says it makes her feel old. Aunt Hilda. Anyway, Aunt Hilda's husband left her a lot of money  my mom says she's worth over a million dollars  but she's a tightwad.' He stopped, leaving his father space to protest, but his father only smiled sourly and nodded. Pop Merrill, who knew all about that situation (there was not, in truth, much in Castle Rock and the surrounding areas Pop didn't know at least something about), simply held his peace and waited for the boy to get around to spilling it. 'She comes and spends Christmas with us every three years, and that's about the only time we go to church, because she goes to church. We have lots of broccoli when Aunt Hilda comes. None of us like it, and it just about makes my sister puke, but Aunt Hilda likes broccoli a lot, so we have it. There was a book on our summer reading list, Great Expectations, and there was a lady in it who was just like Aunt Hilda. She got her kicks dangling her money in front of her relatives. Her name was Miss Havisham, and when Miss Havisham said frog, people jumped. We jump, and I guess the rest of our family does, too.' 'Oh, your Uncle Randy makes your mother look like a piker,' Mr Delevan said unexpectedly. Kevin thought his dad meant it to sound amused in a cynical sort of way, but what came through was a deep, acidic bitterness. 'When Aunt Hilda says frog in Randy's house, they all just about turn cartwheels over the roofbeams.' 'Anyway,' Kevin told Pop, 'she sends me the same thing for my birthday every year. I mean, each one is different, but each one's really the same.' 'What is it she sends you, boy?' 'A string tie,' Kevin said. 'Like the kind you see guys wearing in oldtime countrymusic bands. It has something different on the clasp every year, but it's always a string tie.' Pop snatched the magnifying glass and bent over the picture with it. 'Stone the crows!' he said, straightening up. 'A string tie! That's just what it is! Now how come I didn't see that?' 'Because it isn't the sort of thing a dog would wear around his neck, I guess,' Kevin said in that same wooden voice. They had been here for only fortyfive minutes or so, but he felt as if he had aged another fifteen years. The thing to remember, his mind told him over and over, is that the camera is gone. It's nothing but splinters. Never mind all the King's horses and all the King's men; not even all the guys who work making cameras at the Polaroid factory in Schenectady could put that baby back together again. Yes, and thank God. Because this was the end of the line. As far as Kevin was concerned, if he never encountered the supernatural again until he was eighty, never so much as brushed up against it, it would still be too soon. 'Also, it's very small,' Mr Delevan pointed out. 'I was there when Kevin took it out of the box, and we all knew what it was going to be. The only mystery was what would be on the clasp this year. We joked about it.' 'What is on the clasp?' Pop asked, peering into the photograph again ... or peering at it, anyway Kevin would testify in any court in the land that peering into a Polaroid was simply impossible. 'A bird,' Kevin said. 'I'm pretty sure it's a woodpecker. And that's what the dog in the picture is wearing around its neck. A string tie with a woodpecker on the clasp.' 'Jesus!' Pop said. He was in his own quiet way one of the world's finest actors, but there was no need to simulate the surprise he felt now. Mr Delevan abruptly swept all the Polaroids together. 'Let's put these goddam things in the woodstove,' he said. When Kevin and his father got home, it was ten minutes past five and starting to drizzle. Mrs Delevan's twoyearold Toyota was not in the driveway, but she had been and gone. There was a note from her on the kitchen table, held down by the salt and pepper shakers. When Kevin unfolded the note, a tendollar bill fell out. Dear Kevin, At the bridge game Jane Doyon asked if Meg and I would like to have dinner with her at Bonanza as her husband is off to Pittsburgh on business and she's knocking around the house alone. I said we'd be delighted. Meg especially. You know how much she likes to be 'one of the girls'! Hope you don't mind eating in 'solitary splendor.' Why not order a pizza  some soda for yourself, and your father can order for himself when he gets home. He doesn't like reheated pizza  you know he'll want a couple of beers. Luv you, Mom They looked at each other, both saying Well, there's one thing we don't have to worry about without having to say it out loud. Apparently neither she nor Meg had noticed that Mr Delevan's car was still in the garage. 'Do you want me to ' Kevin began, but there was no need to finish because his father cut across him 'Yes. Check. Right now.' Kevin went up the stairs by twos and into his room. He had a bureau and a desk. The bottom desk drawer was full of what Kevin simply thought of as 'stuff' things it would have seemed somehow criminal to throw away, although he had no real use for any of them. There was his grandfather's pocketwatch, heavy, scrolled, magnificent ... and so badly rusted that the jeweler in Lewiston he and his mother had brought it to only took one look, shook his head, and pushed it back across the counter. There were two sets of matching cufflinks and two orphans, a Penthouse gatefold, a paperback book called Gross Jokes, and a Sony Walkman which had for some reason developed a habit of eating the tapes it was supposed to play. It was just stuff, that was all. There was no other word that fit. Part of the stuff, of course, was the thirteen string ties Aunt Hilda had sent him for his last thirteen birthdays. He took them out one by one, counted, came up with twelve instead of thirteen, rooted through the stuffdrawer again, then counted again. Still twelve. 'Not there?' Kevin, who had been squatting, cried out and leaped to his feet. 'I'm sorry,' Mr Delevan said from the doorway. 'That was dumb.' 'That's okay,' Kevin said. He wondered briefly how fast a person's heart could beat before the person in question simply blew his engine. 'I'm just ... on edge. Stupid.' 'It's not.' His father looked at him soberly. 'When I saw that tape, I got so scared I felt like maybe I'd have to reach into my mouth and push my stomach back down with my fingers.' Kevin looked at his father gratefully. 'It's not there, is it?' Mr Delevan said. 'The one with the woodpecker or whatever in hell it was supposed to be?' 'No. It's not.' 'Did you keep the camera in that drawer?' Kevin nodded his head slowly. 'Pop  Mr Merrill  said to let it rest every so often. That was part of the schedule he made out.' Something tugged briefly at his mind, was gone. 'So I stuck it in there.' 'Boy,' Mr Delevan said softly. 'Yeah.' They looked at each other in the gloom, and then suddenly Kevin smiled. It was like watching the sun burst through a raft of clouds. 'What?' 'I was remembering how it felt,' Kevin said. 'I swung that sledgehammer so hard ' Mr Delevan began to smile, too. 'I thought you were going to take off your own damned and when it hit it made this CRUNCH! sound flew every damn whichway ' 'BOOM!' Kevin finished. 'Gone!' They began to laugh together in Kevin's room, and Kevin found he was almost  almost  glad all this had happened. The sense of relief was as inexpressible and yet as perfect as the sensation one feels when, either by happy accident or by some psychic guidance, another person manages to scratch that one itchy place on one's back that one cannot scratch oneself, hitting it exactly, bang on the money, making it wonderfully worse for a single second by the simple touch, pressure, arrival, of those fingers ... and then, oh blessed relief. It was like that with the camera and with his father's knowing. 'It's gone,' Kevin said. 'Isn't it?' 'As gone as Hiroshima after the Enola Gay dropped the Abomb on it,' Mr Delevan replied, and then added 'Smashed to shit, is what I mean to say.' Kevin gawped at his father and then burst into helpless peals  screams, almost  of laughter. His father joined him. They ordered a loaded pizza shortly after. When Mary and Meg Delevan arrived home at twenty past seven, they both still had the giggles. 'Well, you two look like you've been up to no good,' Mrs Delevan said, a little puzzled. There was something in their hilarity that struck the woman centre of her  that deep part which the sex seems to tap into fully only in times of childbirth and disaster  as a little unhealthy. They looked and sounded like men who may have just missed having a car accident. 'Want to let the ladies in on it?' 'Just two bachelors having a good time,' Mr Delevan said. 'Smashing good time,' Kevin amplified, to which his father added, 'is what we mean to say,' and they looked at each other and were howling again. Meg, honestly bewildered, looked at her mother and said 'Why are they doing that, Mom?' Mrs Delevan said, 'Because they have penises, dear. Go hang up your coat.' Pop Merrill let the Delevans, pere et fils, out, and then locked the door behind them. He turned off all the lights save for the one over the worktable, produced his keys, and opened his own stuffdrawer. From it he took Kevin Delevan's Polaroid Sun 660, chipped but otherwise undamaged, and looked at it fixedly. It had scared both the father and the son. That was clear enough to Pop; it had scared him as well, and still did. But to put a thing like this on a block and smash it to smithereens? That was crazy. There was a way to turn a buck on this goddam thing. There always was. Pop locked it away in the drawer. He would sleep on it, and by the morning he would know how to proceed. In truth, he already had a pretty goddam good idea. He got up, snapped off the worklight, and wove his way through the gloom toward the steps leading up to his apartment. He moved with the unthinking surefooted grace of long practice. Halfway there, he stopped. He felt an urge, an amazingly strong urge, to go back and look at the camera again. What in God's name for? He didn't even have any film for the Christless thing ... not that he had any intentions of taking any pictures with it. If someone else wanted to take some snapshots, watch that dog's progress, the buyer was welcome. Caveet emperor, as he always said. Let the goddam emperor caveet or not as it suited him. As for him, he'd as soon go into a cage filled with lions without even a goddam whip and chair. Still ... 'Leave it,' he said roughly in the darkness, and the sound of his own voice startled him and got him moving and he went upstairs without another look back. CHAPTER 7 Very early the next morning, Kevin Delevan had a nightmare so horrible he could only remember parts of it, like isolated phrases of music heard on a radio with a defective speaker. He was walking into a grungy little milltown. Apparently he was on the bum, because he had a pack on his back. The name of the town was Oatley, and Kevin had the idea it was either in Vermont or upstate New York. You know anyone hiring here in Oatley? he asked an old man pushing a shoppingcart along a cracked sidewalk. There were no groceries in the cart; it was full of indeterminate junk, and Kevin realized the man was a wino. Get away! the wino screamed. Get away! Feef! Fushing feef! Fushing FEEF! Kevin ran, darted across the street, more frightened of the man's madness than he was of the idea anyone might believe that he, Kevin, was a thief. The wino called after him This ain't Oatley! This is Hildasville! Get out of town, you fushing feef! It was then that he realized that this town wasn't Oatley or Hildasville or any other town with a normal name. How could an utterly abnormal town have a normal name? Everything  streets, buildings, cars, signs, the few pedestrians  was twodimensional. Things had height, they had width ... but they had no thickness. He passed a woman who looked the way Meg's ballet teacher might look if the ballet teacher put on a hundred and fifty pounds. She was wearing slacks the color of Bazooka bubble gum. Like the wino, she was pushing a shoppingcart. It had a squeaky wheel. It was full of Polaroid Sun 660 cameras. She looked at Kevin with narrow suspicion as they drew closer together. At the moment when they passed each other on the sidewalk, she disappeared. Her shadow was still there and he could still hear that rhythmic squeaking, but she was no longer there. Then she reappeared, looking back at him from her fat flat suspicious face, and Kevin understood the reason why she had disappeared for a moment. It was because the concept of 'a side view' didn't exist, couldn't exist, in a world where everything was perfectly flat. This is Polaroidsville, he thought with a relief which was strangely mingled with horror. And that means this is only a dream. Then he saw the white picket fence, and the dog, and the photographer standing in the gutter. There were rimless spectacles propped up on his head. It was Pop Merrill. Well, son, you found him, the twodimensional Polaroid Pop said to Kevin without removing his eye from the shutter. That's the dog, right there. The one tore up that kid out in Schenectady. YOUR dog, is what I mean to say. Then Kevin woke up in his own bed, afraid he had screamed but more concerned at first not about the dream but to make sure he was all there, all three dimensions of him. He was. But something was wrong. Stupid dream, he thought. Let it go, why can't you? It's over. Photos are burned, all fiftyeight of them. And the camera's bus His thought broke off like ice as that something, that something wrong, teased at his mind again. It's not over, he thought. It's n But before the thought could finish itself, Kevin Delevan fell deeply, dreamlessly asleep. The next morning, he barely remembered the nightmare at all. CHAPTER 9 Back in September, he hadn't even bothered to wonder if he would sell the Polaroid; the only questions were how soon and how much. The Delevans had bandied the word supernatural about, and Pop hadn't corrected them, although he knew that what the Sun was doing would be more properly classed by psychic investigators as a paranormal rather than supernatural phenomenon. He could have told them that, but if he had, they might both have wondered how come the owner of a smalltown usedgoods store (and parttime usurer) knew so much about the subject. The fact was this he knew a lot because it was profitable to know a lot, and it was profitable to know a lot because of the people he thought of as 'my Mad Hatters.' Mad Hatters were people who recorded empty rooms on expensive audio equipment not for a lark or a drunken party stunt, but either because they believed passionately in an unseen world and wanted to prove its existence, or because they wanted passionately to get in touch with friends andor relatives who had 'passed on' ('passed on' that's what they always called it; Mad Hatters never had relatives who did something so simple as die). Mad Hatters not only owned and used Ouija Boards, they had regular conversations with 'spirit guides' in the 'other world' (never 'heaven,' 'hell,' or even 'the rest area of the dead' but the 'other world') who put them in touch with friends, relatives, queens, dead rockandroll singers, even archvillains. Pop knew of a Mad Hatter in Vermont who had twiceweekly conversations with Hitler. Hitler had told him it was all a bum rap, he had sued for peace in January of 1943 and that son of a bitch Churchill had turned him down. Hitler had also told him Paul Newman was a space alien who had been born in a cave on the moon. Mad Hatters went to seances as regularly (and as compulsively) as drug addicts visited their pushers. They bought crystal balls and amulets guaranteed to bring good luck; they organized their own little societies and investigated reputedly haunted houses for all the usual phenomena teleplasma, tablerappings, floating tables and beds, cold spots, and, of course, ghosts. They noted all of these, real or imagined, with the enthusiasm of dedicated birdwatchers. Most of them had a ripping good time. Some did not. There was that fellow from Wolfeboro, for instance. He hanged himself in the notorious Tecumseh House, where a gentleman farmer had, in the 1880s and '90s, helped his fellow men by day and helped himself to them by night, dining on them at a formal table in his cellar. The table stood upon a floor of sour packed dirt which had yielded the bones and decomposed bodies of at least twelve and perhaps as many as thirtyfive young men, all vagabonds. The fellow from Wolfeboro had left this brief note on a pad of papers beside his Ouija Board Can't leave the house. Doors all locked. I hear him eating. Tried cotton. Does no good. And the poor deluded asshole probably thought he really did, Pop had mused after hearing this story from a source he trusted. Then there was a fellow in Dunwich, Massachusetts, to whom Pop had once sold a socalled 'spirit trumpet' for ninety dollars; the fellow had taken the trumpet to the Dunwich Cemetery and must have heard something exceedingly unpleasant, because he had been raving in a padded cell in Arkham for almost six years now, totally insane. When he had gone into the boneyard, his hair had been black; when his screams awoke the few neighbors who lived close enough to the cemetery to hear them and the police were summoned, it was as white as his howling face. And there was the woman in Portland who lost an eye when a session with the Ouija Board went cataclysmically wrong ... the man in Kingston, Rhode Island, who lost three fingers on his right hand when the rear door of a car in which two teenagers had committed suicide closed on it ... the old lady who landed in Massachusetts Memorial Hospital short most of one ear when her equally elderly cat, Claudette, supposedly went on a rampage during a seance ... Pop believed some of these things, disbelieved others, and mostly held no opinion  not because he didn't have enough hard evidence one way or the other, but because he didn't give a fart in a high wind about ghosts, seances, crystal balls, spirit trumpets, rampaging cats, or the fabled John the Conquerer Root. As far as Reginald Marion 'Pop' Merrill was concerned, the Mad Hatters could all take a flying fuck at the moon. As long, of course, as one of them handed over some mighty tall tickets for Kevin Delevan's camera before taking passage on the next shuttle. Pop didn't call these enthusiasts Mad Hatters because of their spectral interests; he called them that because the great majority  he was sometimes tempted to say all of them  seemed to be rich, retired, and just begging to be plucked. If you were willing to spend fifteen minutes with them nodding and agreeing while they assured you they could pick a fake medium from a real one just by walking into the room, let alone sitting down at the seance table, or if you spent an equal amount of time listening to garbled noises which might or might not be words on a tape player with the proper expression of awe on your face, you could sell them a fourdollar paperweight for a hundred by telling them a man had once glimpsed his dead mother in it. You gave them a smile and they wrote you a check for two hundred dollars. You gave them an encouraging word and they wrote you a check for two thousand dollars. If you gave them both things at the same time, they just kind of passed the checkbook over to you and asked you to fill in an amount. It had always been as easy as taking candy from a baby. Until now. Pop didn't keep a file in his cabinet marked MAD HATTERS any more than he kept one marked COIN COLLECTORS or STAMP COLLECTORS. He didn't even have a filecabinet. The closest thing to it was a battered old book of phone numbers he carried around in his back pocket (which, like his purse, had over the years taken on the shallow ungenerous curve of the spindly buttock it lay against every day). Pop kept his files where a man in his line of work should always keep them in his head. There were eight fullblown Mad Hatters that he had done business with over the years, people who didn't just dabble in the occult but who got right down and rolled around in it. The richest was a retired industrialist named McCarty who lived on his own island about twelve miles off the coast. This fellow disdained boats and employed a fulltime pilot who flew him back and forth to the mainland when he needed to go. Pop went to him on September 28th, the day after he obtained the camera from Kevin (he didn't, couldn't, exactly think of it as robbery; the boy, after all, had been planning to smash it to shit anyway, and what he didn't know surely couldn't hurt him). He drove to a private airstrip just north of Boothbay Harbor in his old but perfectly maintained car, then gritted his teeth and slitted his eyes and held onto the steel lockbox with the Polaroid Sun 660 in it for dear fife as the Mad Hatter's Beechcraft plunged down the dirt runway like a rogue horse, rose into the air just as Pop was sure they were going to fall off the edge and be smashed to jelly on the rocks below, and flew away into the autumn empyrean. He had made this trip twice before, and had sworn each time that he would never get into that goddam flying coffin again. They bumped and jounced along with the hungry Atlantic less than five hundred feet below, the pilot talking cheerfully the whole way. Pop nodded and said ayuh in what seemed like the right places, although he was more concerned with his imminent demise than with anything the pilot was saying. Then the island was ahead with its horribly, dismally, suicidally short landing strip and its sprawling house of redwood and fieldstone, and the pilot swooped down, leaving Pop's poor old acidshrivelled stomach somewhere in the air above them, and they hit with a thud and then, somehow, miraculously, they were taxiing to a stop, still alive and whole, and Pop could safely go back to believing God was just another invention of the Mad Hatters ... at least until he had to get back in that damned plane for the return journey. 'Great day for flying, huh, Mr Merrill?' the pilot asked, unfolding the steps for him. 'Finest kind,' Pop grunted, then strode up the walk to the house where the Thanksgiving turkey stood in the doorway, smiling in eager anticipation. Pop had promised to show him 'the goddanmedest thing I ever come across,' and Cedric McCarty looked like he couldn't wait. He'd take one quick look for form's sake, Pop thought, and then fork over the lettuce. He went back to the mainland fortyfive minutes later, barely noticing the thumps and jounces and gutgoozling drops as the Beech hit the occasional airpocket. He was a chastened, thoughtful man. He had aimed the Polaroid at the Mad Hatter and took his picture. While they waited for it to develop, the Mad Hatter took a picture of Pop ... and when the flashbulb went off, had he heard something? Had he heard the low, ugly snarl of that black dog, or had it been his imagination? Imagination, most likely. Pop had made some magnificent deals in his time, and you couldn't do that without imagination. Still Cedric McCarty, retired industrialist par excellence and Mad Hatter extraordinaire, watched the photographs develop with that same childlike eagerness, but when they finally came clear, he looked amused and even perhaps a little contemptuous and Pop knew with the infallible intuition which had developed over almost fifty years that arguing, cajolery, even vague hints that he had another customer just slavering for a chance to buy this camera  none of those usually reliable techniques would work. A big orange NO SALE card had gone up in Cedric McCarty's mind. But why? Goddammit, why? In the picture Pop took, that glint Kevin had spotted amid the wrinkles of the black dog's muzzle had clearly become a tooth  except tooth wasn't the right word, not by any stretch of the imagination. That was a fang. In the one McCarty took, you could see the beginnings of the neighboring teeth. Fucking dog's got a mouth like a beartrap, Pop thought. Unbidden, an image of his arm in that dog's mouth rose in his mind. He saw the dog not biting it, not eating it, but shredding it, the way the many teeth of a woodchipper shreds bark, leaves, and small branches. How long would it take? he wondered, and looked at those dirty eyes staring out at him from the overgrown face and knew it wouldn't take long. Or suppose the dog seized him by the crotch, instead? Suppose But McCarty had said something and was waiting for a response. Pop turned his attention to the man, and any lingering hope he might have held of making a sale evaporated. The Mad Hatter extraordinaire, who would cheerfully spend an afternoon with you trying to call UP the ghost of your dear departed Uncle Ned, was gone. In his place was McCarty's other side the hardheaded realist who had made Fortune magazine's listing of the richest men in America for twelve straight years  not because he was an airhead who had had the good fortune to inherit both a lot of money and an honest, capable staff to husband and expand it, but because he had been a genius in the field of aerodynamic design and development. He was not as rich as Howard Hughes but not quite as crazy as Hughes had been at the end, either. When it came to psychic phenomena, the man was a Mad Hatter. Outside that one area, however, he was a shark that make the likes of Pop Merrill look like a tadpole swimming in a mudpuddle. 'Sorry,' Pop said. 'I was woolgatherin a little, Mr McCarty.' 'I said it's fascinating,' McCarty said. 'Especially the subtle indications of passing time from one photo to the next. How does it work? Camera in camera?' 'I don't understand what you're gettin at.' 'No, not a camera,' McCarty said, speaking to himself. He picked the camera up and shook it next to his ear. 'More likely some sort of roller device.' Pop stared at the man with no idea what he was talking about ... except it spelled NO SALE, whatever it was. That goddam Christless ride in the little plane (and soon to do over again), all for nothing. But why? Why? He had been so sure of this fellow, who would probably believe the Brooklyn Bridge was a spectral illusion from the 'other side' if you told him it was. So why? 'Slots, of course!' McCarty said, as delighted as a child. 'Slots! There's a circular belt on pulleys inside this housing with a number of slots built into it. Each slot contains an exposed Polaroid picture of this dog. Continuity suggests' he looked carefully at the pictures again  'yes, that the dog might have been filmed, with the Polaroids made from individual frames. When the shutter is released, a picture drops from its slot and emerges. The battery turns the belt enough to position the next photo, and  voila!' His pleasant expression was suddenly gone, and Pop saw a man who looked like he might have made his way to fame and fortune over the broken, bleeding bodies of his competitors ... and enjoyed it. 'Joe will fly you back,' he said. His voice had gone chill and impersonal. 'You're good, Mr Merrill'  this man, Pop realized glumly, would never call him Pop again 'I'll admit that. You've finally overstepped yourself, but for a long time you had me fooled. How much did you take me for? Was it all claptrap?' 'I didn't take you for one red cent,' Pop said, lying stoutly. 'I never sold you one single thing I didn't b'lieve was the genuine article, and what I mean to say is that goes for that camera as well.' 'You make me sick,' McCarty said. 'Not because I trusted you; I've trusted others who were fakes and shams. Not because you took my money; it wasn't enough to matter. You make me sick because it's men like you that have kept the scientific investigation of psychic phenomena in the dark ages, something to be laughed at, something to be dismissed as the sole province of crackpots and dimwits. The one consolation is that sooner or later you fellows always overstep yourselves. You get greedy and try to palm off something ridiculous like this. I want you out of here, Mr Merrill.' Pop had his pipe in his mouth and a Diamond Blue Tip in one shaking hand. McCarty pointed at him, and the chilly eyes above that finger made it look like the barrel of a gun. 'And if you light that stinking thing in here,' he said, 'I'll have Joe yank it out of your mouth and dump the coals down the back of your pants. So unless you want to leave my house with your skinny ass in flames, I suggest ' 'What's the matter with you, Mr McCarty?' Pop bleated. 'These pitchers didn't come out all developed! You watched em develop with your own eyes!' 'An emulsion any kid with a twelvedollar chemistry set could whip up,' McCarty said coldly. 'It's not the catalystfixative the Polaroid people use, but it's close. You expose your Polaroids  or create them from moviefilm, if that's what you did  and then you take them in a standard darkroom and paint them with the goop. When they're dry, you load them. When they pop out, they look like any Polaroid that hasn't started to develop yet. Solid gray in a white border. Then the light hits your homemade emulsion, creating a chemical change, and it evaporates, showing a picture you yourself took hours or days or weeks before. Joe?' Before Pop could say anything else, his arms were seized and he was not so much walked as propelled from the spacious, glasswalled living room. He wouldn't have said anything, anyway. Another of the many things a good businessman had to know was when he was licked. And yet he wanted to shout over his shoulder Some dumb cunt with dyed hair and a crystal ball she ordered from Fate magazine floats a book or a lamp or a page of goddam sheetmusic through a dark room and you bout shit yourself, but when I show you a camera that takes pitchers of some other world, you have me thrown out by the seat of m'pants! You're mad as a hatter, all right! Well, fuck ya! There's other fish in the sea! So there were. On October 5th, Pop got into his perfectly maintained car and drove to Portland to pay a visit on the Pus Sisters.


The Pus Sisters were identical twins who lived in Portland. They were eighty or so but looked older than Stonehenge. They chainsmoked Camel cigarettes, and had done so since they were seventeen, they were happy to tell you. They never coughed in spite of the six packs they smoked between them each and every day. They were driven about  on those rare occasions when they left their red brick Colonial mansion  in a 1958 Lincoln Continental which had the somber glow of a hearse. This vehicle was piloted by a black woman only a little younger than the Pus Sisters themselves. This female chauffeur was probably a mute, but might just be something a bit more special one of the few truly taciturn human beings God ever made. Pop did not know and had never asked. He had dealt with the two old ladies for nearly thirty years, the black woman had been with them all that time, mostly driving the car, sometimes washing it, sometimes mowing the lawn or clipping the hedges around the house, sometimes stalking down to the mailbox on the corner with letters from the Pus Sisters to God alone knew who (he didn't know if the black woman ever went or was allowed inside the house, either, only that he had never seen her there), and during all that time he had never heard this marvellous creature speak. The Colonial mansion was in Portland's Bramhall district, which is to Portland what the Beacon Hill area is to Boston. In that latter city, in the land of the bean and the cod, it's said the Cabots speak only to Lowells and the Lowells speak only to God, but the Pus Sisters and their few remaining contemporaries in Portland would and did calmly assert that the Lowells had turned a private connection into a party line some years after the Deeres and their Portland contemporaries had set up the original wire. And of course no one in his right mind would have called them the Pus Sisters to their identical faces any more than anyone in his right mind would have stuck his nose in a bandsaw to take care of a troublesome itch. They were the Pus Sisters when they weren't around (and when one was fairly sure one was in company which didn't contain a talebearer or two), but their real names were Miss Eleusippus Deere and Mrs. Meleusippus Verrill. Their father, in his determination to combine devout Christianity with an exhibition of his own erudition, had named them for two of three triplets who had all become saints ... but who, unfortunately, had been male saints. Meleusippus's husband had died a great many years before, during the Battle of Leyte Gulf in 1944, as a matter of fact. but she had resolutely kept his name ever since, which made it impossible to take the easy way out and simply call them the Misses Deere. No; you had to practice those goddamned tonguetwister names until they came out as smooth as shit from a waxed asshole. If you fucked up once, they held it against you, and you might lose their custom for as long as six months or a year. Fuck up twice, and don't even bother to call. Ever again. Pop drove with the steel box containing the Polaroid camera on the seat beside him, saying their names over and over again in a low voice 'Eleusippus. Meleusippus. Eleusippus and Meleusippus. Ayuh. That's all right.' But, as it turned out, that was the only thing that was all right. They wanted the Polaroid no more than McCarty had wanted it ... although Pop had been so shaken by that encounter he went in fully prepared to take ten thousand dollars less, or fifty per cent of his original confident estimate of what the camera might fetch. The elderly black woman was raking leaves, revealing a lawn which, October or not, was still as green as the felt on a billiard table. Pop nodded to her. She looked at him, looked through him, and continued raking leaves. Pop rang the bell and, somewhere in the depths of the house, a bell bonged. Mansion seemed the perfectly proper word for the Pus Sisters' domicile. Although it was nowhere as big as some of the old homes in the Bramhall district, the perpetual dimness which reigned inside made it seem much bigger. The sound of the bell really did seem to come floating through a depth of rooms and corridors and the sound of that bell always stirred a specific image in Pop's mind the deadcart passing through the streets of London during the plague year, the driver ceaselessly tolling his bell and crying, 'Bring outcher dead! Bring outcher dead! For the luvva Jaysus, bring outcher dead!' The Pus Sister who opened the door some thirty seconds later looked not only dead but embalmed; a mummy between whose lips someone had poked the smouldering butt of a cigarette for a joke. 'Merrill,' the lady said. Her dress was a deep blue, her hair colored to match. She tried to speak to him as a great lady would speak to a tradesman who had come to the wrong door by mistake, but Pop could see she was, in her way, every bit as excited as that son of a bitch McCarty had been; it was just that the Pus Sisters had been born in Maine, raised in Maine, and would die in Maine, while McCarty hailed from someplace in the Midwest, where the art and craft of taciturnity were apparently not considered an important part of a child's upbringing. A shadow flitted somewhere near the parlor end of the hallway, just visible over the bony shoulder of the sister who had opened the door. The other one. Oh. they were eager, all right. Pop began to wonder if he couldn't squeeze twelve grand out of them after all. Maybe even fourteen. Pop knew he could say, 'Do I have the honor of addressing Miss Deere or Mrs Verrill?' and be completely correct and completely polite, but he had dealt with this pair of eccentric old bags before and he knew that, while the Pus Sister who had opened the door wouldn't raise an eyebrow or flare a nostril, would simply tell him which one he was speaking to, he would lose at least a thousand by doing so. They took great pride in their odd masculine names, and were apt to look more kindly on a person who tried and failed than one who took the coward's way out. So, saying a quick mental prayer that his tongue wouldn't fail him now that the moment had come, he gave it his best and was pleased to hear the names slip as smoothly from his tongue as a pitch from a snakeoil salesman 'Is it Eleusippus or Meleusippus?' he asked, his face suggesting he was no more concerned about getting the names right than if they had been Joan and Kate. 'Meleusippus, Mr Merrill,' she said, ah, good, now he was Mister Merrill, and he was sure everything was going to go just as slick as ever a man could want, and he was just as wrong as ever a man could be. 'Won't you step in?' 'Thank you kindly,' Pop said, and entered the gloomy depths of the Deere Mansion. 'Oh dear,' Eleusippus Deere said as the Polaroid began to develop. 'What a brute he looks!' Meleusippus Verrill said, speaking in tones of genuine dismay and fear. The dog was getting uglier, Pop had to admit that, and there was something else that worried him even more the timesequence of the pictures seemed to be speeding up. He had posed the Pus Sisters on their Queen Anne sofa for the demonstration picture. The camera flashed its bright white light, turning the room for one single instant from the purgatorial zone between the land of the living and that of the dead where these two old relics somehow existed into something flat and tawdry, like a police photo of a museum in which a crime had been committed. Except the picture which emerged did not show the Pus Sisters sitting together on their parlor sofa like identical bookends. The picture showed the black dog, now turned so that it was fullface to the camera and whatever photographer it was who was nuts enough to stand there and keep snapping pictures of it. Now all of its teeth were exposed in a crazy, homicidal snarl, and its head had taken on a slight, predatory tilt to the left. That head, Pop thought, would continue to tilt as it sprang at its victim, accomplishing two purposes concealing the vulnerable area of its neck from possible attack and putting the head in a position where, once the teeth were clamped solidly in flesh, it could revolve upright again, ripping a large chunk of living tissue from its target. 'It's so awful!' Eleusippus said, putting one mummified hand to the scaly flesh of her neck. 'So terrible!' Meleusippus nearly moaned, lighting a fresh Camel from the butt of an old one with a hand shaking so badly she came close to branding the cracked and fissured left comer of her mouth. 'It's totally inexPLICKable!' Pop said triumphantly, thinking I wish you was here, McCarty, you happy asshole. I just wish you was. Here's two ladies been round the Horn and back a few times that don't think this goddam camera's just some kind of a carny magicshow trick! 'Does it show something which has happened?' Meleusippus whispered. 'Or something which will happen?' Eleusippus added in an equally awed whisper. 'I dunno,' Pop said. 'All I know for sure is that I have seen some goddam strange things in my time, but I've never seen the beat of these pitchers.' 'I'm not surprised!' Eleusippus. 'Nor E' Meleusippus. Pop was all set to start the conversation going in the direction of price  a delicate business when you were dealing with anyone, but never more so than when you were dealing with the Pus Sisters when it got down to hard trading, they were as delicate as a pair of virgins  which, for all Pop knew, at least one of them was. He was just deciding on the To start with, it never crossed my mind to sell something like this, but ... approach (it was older than the Pus Sisters themselves  although probably not by much, you would have said after a good close look at them  but when you were dealing with Mad Hatters, that didn't matter a bit; in fact, they liked to hear it, the way small children like to hear the same fairy tales over and over) when Eleusippus absolutely floored him by saying, 'I don't know about my sister, Mr Merrill, but I wouldn't feel comfortable looking at anything you might have to'  here a slight, pained pause  'offer us in a business way until you put that ... that camera, or whatever Godawful thing it is ... back in your car.' 'I couldn't agree more,' Meleusippus said, stubbing out her halfsmoked Camel in a fishshaped ashtray which was doing everything but shitting Camel cigarette butts. 'Ghost photographs,' Eleusippus said, 'are one thing. They have a certain ' 'Dignity,' Meleusippus suggested. 'Yes! Dignity! But that dog ' The old woman actually shivered. 'It looks as if it's ready to jump right out of that photograph and bite one of us.' 'All of us!' Meleusippus elaborated. Up until this last exchange, Pop had been convinced  perhaps because he had to be  that the sisters had merely begun their own part of the dickering, and in admirable style. But the tone of their voices, as identical as their faces and figures (if they could have been said to have such things as figures), was beyond his power to disbelieve. They had no doubt that the Sun 660 was exhibiting some sort of paranormal behavior ... too paranormal to suit them. They weren't dickering; they weren't pretending; they weren't playing games with him in an effort to knock the price down. When they said they wanted no part of the camera and the weird thing it was doing, that was exactly what they meant  nor had they done him the discourtesy (and that's just what it would have been, in their minds) of supposing or even dreaming that selling it had been his purpose in coming. Pop looked around the parlor. It was like the old lady's room in a horror movie he'd watched once on his VCR  a piece of claptrap called Burnt Offerings, where this big old beefy fella tried to drown his son in the swimming pool but nobody even took their clothes off. That lady's room had been filled, overfilled, actually stuffed with old and new photographs. They sat on the tables and the mantel in every sort of frame; they covered so much of the walls you couldn't even tell what the pattern on the frigging paper was supposed to be. The Pus Sisters' parlor wasn't quite that bad, but there were still plenty of photographs; maybe as many as a hundred and fifty, which seemed like three times that many in a room as small and dim as this one. Pop had been here often enough to notice most of them at least in passing, and he knew others even better than that, for he had been the one to sell them to Eleusippus and Meleusippus. They had a great many more 'ghost photographs,' as Eleusippus Deere called them, perhaps as many as a thousand in all, but apparently even they had realized a room the size of their parlor was limited in terms of displayspace, if not in those of taste. The rest of the ghost photographs were distributed among the mansion's other fourteen rooms. Pop had seen them all. He was one of the fortunate few who had been granted what the Pus Sisters called, with simple grandiosity, The Tour. But it was here in the parlor that they kept their prize 'ghost photographs,' with the prize of prizes attracting the eye by the simple fact that it stood in solitary splendor atop the closed Steinway baby grand by the bow windows. In it, a corpse was levitating from its coffin before fifty or sixty horrified mourners. It was a fake, of course. A child of ten  hell, a child of eight  would have known it was a fake. It made the photographs of the dancing elves which had so bewitched poor Arthur Conan Doyle near the end of his life look accomplished by comparison. In fact, as Pop ranged his eye about the room, he saw only two photographs that weren't obvious fakes. It would take closer study to see how the trickery had been worked in those. Yet these two ancient pussies, who had collected 'ghost photographs' all their lives and claimed to be great experts in the field, acted like a couple of teenage girls at a horror movie when he showed them not just a paranormal photograph but a goddam Jesusjumping paranormal camera that didn't just do its trick once and then quit, like the one that had taken the picture of the ghostlady watching the foxhunters come home, but one that did it again and again and again, and how much had they spent on this stuff that was nothing but claptrap? Thousands? Tens of thousands? Hundreds of 'show us?' Meleusippus was asking him. Pop Merrill forced his lips to turn up in what must have been at least a reasonable imitation of his Folksy Crackerbarrel Smile, because they registered no surprise or distrust. 'Pardon me, dear lady,' Pop said. 'M'mind went woolgatherin all on its own for a minute or two there. I guess it happens to all of us as we get on.' 'We're eightythree, and our minds are as clear as windowglass,' Eleusippus said with clear disapproval. 'Freshly washed windowglass,' Meleusippus added. 'I asked if you have some new photographs you would care to show us ... once you've put that wretched thing away, of course.' 'It's been ages since we saw any really good new ones,' Eleusippus said, lighting a fresh Camel. 'We went to The New England Psychic and Tarot Convention in Providence last month,' Meleusippus said, 'and while the lectures were enlightening' 'and uplifting ' 'so many of the photographs were arrant fakes! Even a child of ten ' of seven! ' 'could have seen through them. So '. Meleusippus paused. Her face assumed an expression of perplexity which looked as if it might hurt (the muscles of her face having long since atrophied into expressions of mild pleasure and serene knowledge). 'I am puzzled. Mr Merrill, I must admit to being a bit puzzled.' 'I was about to say the same thing,' Eleusippus said. 'Why did you bring that awful thing?' Meleusippus and Eleusippus asked in perfect twopart harmony, spoiled only by the nicotine rasp of their voices. The urge Pop felt to say Because I didn't know what a pair of chickenshit old cunts you two were was so strong that for one horrified second he believed he had said it, and he quailed, waiting for the twin screams of outrage to rise in the dim and hallowed confines of the parlor, screams which would rise like the squeal of rusty bandsaws biting into tough pineknots, and go on rising until the glass in the frame of every bogus picture in the room shattered in an agony of vibration. The idea that he had spoken such a terrible thought aloud lasted only a splitsecond, but when he relived it on later wakeful nights while the clocks rustled sleepily below (and while Kevin Delevan's Polaroid crouched sleeplessly in the locked drawer of the worktable), it seemed much longer. In those sleepless hours, he sometimes found himself wishing he had said it, and wondered if he was maybe losing his mind. What he did do was react with speed and a canny instinct for selfpreservation that were nearly noble. To blow up at the Pus Sisters would give him immense gratification, but it would, unfortunately, be shortlived gratification. If he buttered them up  which was exactly what they expected, since they had been basted in butter all their fives (although it hadn't done a goddam thing for their skins)  he could perhaps sell them another three or four thousand dollars' worth of claptrap 'ghost photographs,' if they continued to elude the lung cancer which should surely have claimed one or both at least a dozen years ago. And there were, after all, other Mad Hatters in Pop's mental file, although not quite so many as he'd thought on the day he'd set off to see Cedric McCarty. A little checking had revealed that two had died and one was currently learning how to weave baskets in a posh northern California retreat which catered to the incredibly rich who also happened to have gone hopelessly insane. 'Actually,' he said, 'I brought the camera out so you ladies could look at it. What I mean to say,' he hastened on, observing their expressions of consternation, 'is I know how much experience you ladies have in this field.' Consternation turned to gratification; the sisters exchanged smug, comfy looks, and Pop found himself wishing he could douse a couple of their goddam packs of Camels with barbecue lighter fluid and jam them up their tight little oldmaid asses and then strike a match. They'd smoke then, all right. They'd smoke just like plugged chimneys, was what he meant to say. 'I thought you might have some advice on what I should do with the camera, is what I mean to say,' he finished. 'Destroy it,' Eleusippus said immediately. 'I'd use dynamite,' Meleusippus said. 'Acid first, then dynamite,' Eleusippus said. 'Right,' Meleusippus finished. 'It's dangerous. You don't have to look at that devildog to know that.' She did look, though; they both did, and identical expressions of revulsion and fear crossed their faces. 'You can feel eeevil coming out of it,' Eleusippus said in a voice of such portentousness that it should have been laughable, like a highschool girl playing a witch in Macbeth, but which somehow wasn't. 'Destroy it, Mr Merrill. Before something awful happens. Before  perhaps, you'll notice I only say perhaps  it destroys you.' 'Now, now,' Pop said, annoyed to find he felt just a little uneasy in spite of himself, 'that's drawing it a little strong. It's just a camera, is what I mean to say.' Eleusippus Deere said quietly 'And the planchette that put out poor Colette Simineaux's eye a few years ago  that was nothing but a piece of fiberboard.' 'At least until those foolish, foolish, foolish people put their fingers on it and woke it up,' Meleusippus said, more quietly still. There seemed nothing left to say. Pop picked up the camera  careful to do so by the strap, not touching the actual camera itself, although he told himself this was just for the benefit of these two old pussies  and stood. 'Well, you're the experts,' he said. The two old women looked at each other and preened. Yes; retreat. Retreat was the answer ... for now, at least. But he wasn't done yet. Every dog has its day, and you could take that to the bank. 'I don't want to take up any more of y'time, and I surely don't want to discommode you.' 'Oh, you haven't!' Eleusippus said, also rising. 'We have so very few guests these days!' Meleusippus said, also rising. 'Put it in your car, Mr Merrill,' Eleusippus said, 'and then ' ' come in and have tea.' 'High tea!' And although Pop wanted nothing more in his life than to be out of there (and to tell them exactly that Thanks but no thanks. I want to get the fuck OUT of here), he made a courtly little halfbow and an excuse of the same sort. 'It would be my pleasure,' he said, 'but I'm afraid I have another appointment. I don't get to the city as often as I'd like.' If you're going to tell one lie, you might as well tell a pack, Pop's own Pop had often told him, and it was advice he had taken to heart. He made a business of looking at his watch. 'I've stayed too long already. You girls have made me late, I'm afraid, but I suppose I'm not the first man you've done that to.' They giggled and actually raised identical blushes, like the glow of very old roses. 'Why, Mr Merrill!' Eleusippus trilled. 'Ask me next time,' he said, smiling until his face felt as if it would break. 'Ask me next time, by the Lord Harry! You just ask and see if I don't say yes faster'n a hoss can trot!' He went out, and as one of them quickly closed the door behind him (maybe they think the sun'll fade their goddam fake ghost photographs, Pop thought sourly), he turned and snapped the Polaroid at the old black woman, who was still raking leaves. He did it on impulse, as a man with a mean streak may on impulse swerve across a country road to kill a skunk or raccoon. The black woman's upper lip rose in a snarl, and Pop was stunned to see she was actually forking the sign of the evil eye at him. He got into his car and backed hurriedly down the driveway. The rear end of his car was halfway into the street and he was turning to check for traffic when his eye happened upon the Polaroid he had just taken. It wasn't fully developed; it had the listless, milky look of all Polaroid photographs which are still developing. Yet it had come up enough so that Pop only stared at it, the breath he had begun to unthinkingly draw into his lungs suddenly ceasing like a breeze that unaccountably drops away to nothing for a moment. His very heart seemed to cease in midbeat. What Kevin had imagined was now happening. The dog had finished its pivot, and had now begun its relentless ordained irrefutable approach toward the camera and whoever held it ... ah, but he had held it this time, hadn't he? He, Reginald Marion 'Pop' Merrill, had raised it and snapped it at the old black woman in a moment's pique like a spanked child that shoots a pop bottle off the top of a fencepost with his BB gun because he can't very well shoot his father, although in that humiliating, bottomthrobbing time directly after the paddling he would be more than happy to. The dog was coming. Kevin had known that would happen next, and Pop would have known it, too, if he'd had occasion to think on it, which he hadn't although from this moment on he would find it hard to think of anything else when he thought of the camera, and he would find those thoughts filling more and more of his time, both waking and dreaming. It's coming, Pop thought with the sort of frozen horror a man might feel standing in the dark as some Thing, some unspeakable and unbearable Thing, approaches with its razorsharp claws and teeth. Oh my God, it's coming, that dog is coming. But it wasn't just coming; it was changing. It was impossible to say how. His eyes hurt, caught between what they should be seeing and what they were seeing, and in the end the only handle he could find was a very small one it was as if someone had changed the lens on the camera, from the normal one to a fisheye, so that the dog's forehead with its clots of tangled fur seemed somehow to bulge and recede at the same time, and the dog's murderous eyes seemed to have taken on filthy, barely visible glimmers of red, like the sparks a Polaroid flash sometimes puts in people's eyes. The dog's body seemed to have elongated but not thinned; if anything, it seemed thicker  not fatter, but more heavily muscled. And its teeth were bigger. Longer. Sharper. Pop suddenly found himself remembering Joe Camber's Saint Bernard, Cujo the one who had killed Joe and that old tosspot Gary Pervier and Big George Bannerman. The dog had gone rabid. It had trapped a woman and a young boy in their car up there at Camber's place and after two or three days the kid had died. And now Pop found himself wondering if this was what they had been looking at during those long days and nights trapped in the steaming oven of their car; this or something like this, the muddy red eyes, the long sharp teeth A horn blared impatiently. Pop screamed, his heart not only starting again but gunning, like the engine of a Formula One racingcar. A van swerved around his sedan, still half in the driveway and half in the narrow residential street. The van's driver stuck his fist out his open window and his middle finger popped up. 'Eat my dick, you son of a whore!' Pop screamed. He backed the rest of the way out, but so jerkily that he bumped up over the curb on the far side of the street. He twisted the wheel viciously (inadvertently honking his horn in the process) and then drove off. But three blocks south he had to pull over and just sit there behind the wheel for ten minutes, waiting for the shakes to subside enough so he could drive. So much for the Pus Sisters. During the next five days, Pop ran through the remaining names on his mental list. His asking price, which had begun at twenty thousand dollars with McCarty and dropped to ten with the Pus Sisters (not that he had gotten far enough into the business to mention price in either case), dropped steadily as he ran out the string. He was finally left with Emory Chaffee, and the possibility of realizing perhaps twentyfive hundred. Chaffee presented a fascinating paradox in all Pop's experience with the Mad Hatters  an experience that was long and amazingly varied  Emory Chaffee was the only believer in the 'other world' who had absolutely no imagination whatsoever. That he had ever spared a single thought for the 'other world' with such a mind was surprising; that he believed in it was amazing; that he paid good money to collect objects connected with it was something Pop found absolutely astounding. Yet it was so, and Pop would have put Chaffee much higher on his fist save for the annoying fact that Chaffee was by far the least well off of what Pop thought of as his 'rich' Mad Hatters. He was doing a game but poor job of holding onto the last unravelling threads of what had once been a great family fortune. Hence, another large drop in Pop's asking price for Kevin's Polaroid. But, he had thought, pulling his car into the overgrown driveway of what had in the twenties been one of Sebago Lake's finest summer homes and which was now only a step or two away from becoming one of Sebago Lake's shabbiest yearround homes (the Chaffee house in Portland's Bramhall district had been sold for taxes fifteen years before), if anyone'll buy this beshitted thing, I reckon Emory will. The only thing that really distressed him  and it had done so more and more as he worked his way fruitlessly down the list  was the demonstration part. He could describe what the camera did until he was black in the face, but not even an odd duck like Emory Chaffee would lay out good money on the basis of a description alone. Sometimes Pop thought it had been stupid to have Kevin take all those pictures so he could make that videotape. But when you got right down to where the bear shit in the buckwheat, he wasn't sure it would have made any difference. Time passed over there in that world (for, like Kevin, he had come to think of it as that an actual world), and it passed much more slowly than it did in this one ... but wasn't it speeding up as the dog approached the camera? Pop thought it was. The movement of the dog along the fence had been barely visible at first; now only a blind man could fail to see that the dog was closer each time the shutter was pressed. You could see the difference in distance even if you snapped two photographs one right after the other. It was almost as if time over there were trying to ... well, trying to catch up somehow, and get in sync with time over here. If that had been all, it would have been bad enough. But it wasn't all. That was no dog, goddammit. POP didn't know what it was, but he knew as well as he knew his mother was buried in Homeland Cemetery that it was no dog. He thought it had been a dog, when it had been snuffling its way along that picket fence which it had now left a good ten feet behind; it had looked like one, albeit an exceptionally mean one once it got its head turned enough so you could get a good look at its phiz. But to Pop it now looked like no creature that had ever existed on God's earth, and probably not in Lucifer's hell, either. What troubled him even more was this the few people for whom he had taken demonstration photographs did not seem to see this. They inevitably recoiled, inevitably said it was the ugliest, meanestlooking junkyard mongrel they had ever seen, but that was all. Not a single one of them suggested that the dog in Kevin's Sun 660 was turning into some kind of monster as it approached the photographer. As it approached the lens which might be some sort of portal between that world and this one. Pop thought again (as Kevin had), But it could never get through. Never. If something is going to happen, I'll tell you what that something will be, because that thing is an ANIMAL, Maybe a goddam ugly one, a scary one, even, like the kind of thing a little kid imagines in his closet after his momma turns off the lights, but it's still an ANIMAL, and if anything happens it'll be this there'll be one last pitcher where you can't see nothing but blur because that devildog will have jumped, you can see that's what it means to do, and after that the camera either won't work, or if it does, it won't take pitchers that develop into anything but Black squares, because you can't take pitchers with a camera that has a busted lens or with one that's broke right in two for that matter, and if whoever owns that shadow drops the camera when the devildog hits it and him, and I imagine he will, it's apt to fall on the sidewalk and it probably WILL break. Goddam thing's nothing but plastic, after all, and plastic and cement don't get along hardly at all. But Emory Chaffee had come out on his splintery porch now, where the paint on the boards was flaking off and the boards themselves were warping out of true and the screens were turning the rusty color of dried blood and gaping holes in some of them; Emory Chaffee wearing a blazer which had once been a natty blue but had now been cleaned so many times it was the nondescript gray of an elevator operator's uniform; Emory Chaffee with his high forehead sloping back and back until it finally disappeared beneath what little hair he had left and grinning his Pippip, jolly good, old boy, jolly good, wot, wot? grin that showed his gigantic buck teeth and made him look the way Pop imagined Bugs Bunny would look if Bugs had suffered some cataclysmic mental retardation. Pop took hold of the camera's strap  God, how he had come to hate the thing! got out of his car, and forced himself to return the man's wave and grin. Business, after all, was business. 'That's one ugly pup, wouldn't you say?' Chaffee was studying the Polaroid which was now almost completely developed. Pop had explained what the camera did, and had been encouraged by Chaffee's frank interest and curiosity. Then he had given the Sun to the man, inviting him to take a picture of anything he liked. Emory Chaffee, grinning that repulsive bucktoothed grin, swung the Polaroid Pop's way.


'Except me,' Pop said hastily. 'I'd ruther you pointed a shotgun at my head instead of that camera.' 'When you sell a thing, you really sell it,' Chaffee said admiringly, but he had obliged just the same, turning the Sun 660 toward the wide picture window with its view of the lake, a magnificent view that remained as rich now as the Chaffee family itself had been in those years which began after World War I, golden years which had somehow begun to turn to brass around 1970. He pressed the shutter. The camera whined. Pop winced. He found that now he winced every time he heard that sound that squidgy little whine. He had tried to control the wince and had found to his dismay that he could not. 'Yes, sir, one goddamned ugly brute!' Chaffee repeated after examining the developed picture, and Pop was sourly pleased to see that the repulsive bucktoothed wotho, bitofastickywicket grin had disappeared at last. The camera had been able to do that much, at least. Yet it was equally clear to him that the man wasn't seeing what he, Pop, was seeing. Pop had had some preparation for this eventuality; he was, all the same, badly shaken behind his impassive Yankee mask. He believed that if Chaffee had been granted the power (for that was what it seemed to be) to see what Pop was seeing, the stupid fuck would have been headed for the nearest door, and at top speed. The dog  well, it wasn't a dog, not anymore, but you had to call it something  hadn't begun its leap at the photographer yet, but it was getting ready; its hindquarters were simultaneously bunching and lowering toward the cracked anonymous sidewalk in a way that somehow reminded Pop of a kid's soupedup car, trembling, barely leashed by the clutch during the last few seconds of a red light; the needle on the rpm dial already standing straight up at 60 X 10, the engine screaming through chrome pipes, fat deeptread tires ready to smoke the macadam in a hot soulkiss. The dog's face was no longer a recognizable thing at all. It had twisted and distorted into a carny freakshow thing that seemed to have but a single dark and malevolent eye, neither round nor oval but somehow runny, like the yolk of an egg that has been stabbed with the tines of a fork. Its nose was a black beak with deep flared holes drilled into either side. And was there smoke coming from those holes  like steam from the vents of a volcano? Maybe  or maybe that part was just imagination. Don't matter, Pop thought. You just keep working that shutter, or letting people like this fool work it, and you are gonna find out, aren't you? But he didn't want to find out. He looked at the black, murdering thing whose matted coat had caught perhaps two dozen wayward burdocks, the thing which no longer had fur, exactly, but stuff like living spikes, and a tail like a medieval weapon. He observed the shadow it had taken a damned snotnosed kid to extract meaning from, and saw it had changed. One of the shadowlegs appeared to have moved a stride backward  a very long stride, even taking the effect of the lowering or rising sun (but it was going down; Pop had somehow become very sure it was going down, that it was night coming in that world over there, not day) into account. The photographer over there in that world had finally discovered that his subject did not mean to sit for its portrait; that had never been a part of its plan. It intended to eat, not sit. That was the plan. Eat, and, maybe, in some way he didn't understand, escape. Find out! he thought ironically. Go ahead! Just keep taking pitchers! You'll find out! You'll find out PLENTY! 'And you, sir,' Emory Chaffee was saying, for he had only been stopped for a moment; creatures of little imagination are rarely stopped for long by such trivial things as consideration, 'are one hell of a salesman!' The memory of McCarty was still very close to the surface of Pop's mind, and it still rankled. 'If you think it's a fake ' he began. 'A fake? Not at all! Not ... at all!' Chaffee's bucktoothed smile spread wide in all its repulsive splendor. He spread his hands in a surelyyoujest motion. 'But I'm afraid, you see, that we can't do business on this particular item, Mr Merrill. I'm sorry to say so, but ' 'Why?' Pop bit off. 'If you don't think the goddam thing's a fake, why in the hell don't you want it?' And he was astonished to hear his voice rising in a kind of plaintive, balked fury. There had never been anything like this, never in the history of the world, Pop was sure of it, nor ever would be again. Yet it seemed he couldn't give the goddam thing away. 'But . . .' Chaffee looked puzzled, as if not sure how to state it, because whatever it was he had to say seemed so obvious to him. In that moment he looked like a pleasant but not very capable preschool teacher trying to teach a backward child how to tie his shoes. 'But it doesn't do anything, does it?' 'Doesn't do anything?' Pop nearly screamed. He couldn't believe he had lost control of himself to such a degree as this, and was losing more all the time. What was happening to him? Or, cutting closer to the bone, what was the sonofabitching camera doing to him? 'Doesn't do anything? What are you, blind? It takes pitchers of another world! It takes pitchers that move in time from one to the next, no matter where you take em or when you take em in this world! And that ... that thing ... that monster ' Oh. Oh dear. He had finally done it. He had finally gone too far. He could see it in the way Chaffee was looking at him. 'But it's just a dog, isn't it?' Chaffee said in a low, comforting voice. It was the sort of voice you'd use to try and soothe a madman while the nurses ran for the cabinet where they kept the hypos and the knockout stuff. 'Ayuh,' Pop said slowly and tiredly. 'Just a dog is all it is. But you said yourself it was a hell of an ugly brute.' 'That's right, that's right, I did,' Chaffee said, agreeing much too quickly. Pop thought if the man's grin got any wider and broader he might just be treated to the sight of the top threequarters of the idiot's head toppling off into his lap. 'But ... surely you see, Mr Merrill ... what a problem this presents for the collector. The serious collector.' 'No, I guess I don't,' Pop said, but after running through the entire list of Mad Hatters, a list which had seemed so promising at first, he was beginning to. In fact, he was beginning to see a whole host of problems the Polaroid Sun presented for the serious collector. As for Emory Chaffee ... God knew what Emory thought, exactly. 'There are most certainly such things as ghost photographs,' Chaffee said in a rich, pedantic voice that made Pop want to strangle him. 'But these are not ghost photographs. They ' 'They're sure as hell not normal photographs!' 'My point exactly,' Chaffee said, frowning slightly. 'But what sort of photographs are they? One can hardly say, can one? One can only display a perfectly normal camera that photographs a dog which is apparently preparing to leap. And once it leaps, it will be gone from the frame of the picture. At that point, one of three things may happen. The camera may start taking normal pictures, which is to say, pictures of the things it is aimed at; it may take no more pictures at all, its one purpose, to photograph  to document ' one might even say  that dog, completed; or it may simply go on taking pictures of that white fence and the illtended lawn behind it.' He paused and added, 'I suppose someone might walk by at some point, forty photographs down the line  or four hundred  but unless the photographer raised his angle, which he doesn't seem to have done in any of these, one would only see the passerby from the waist down. More or less.' And, echoing Kevin's father without even knowing who Kevin's father was, he added 'Pardon me for saying so, Mr Merrill, but you've shown me something I thought I'd never see an inexplicable and almost irrefutable paranormal occurrence that is really quite boring.' This amazing but apparently sincere remark forced Pop to disregard whatever Chaffee might think about his sanity and ask again 'It really is only a dog, as far as you can see?' 'Of course,' Chaffee said, looking mildly surprised. 'A stray mongrel that looks exceedingly badtempered.' He sighed. 'And it wouldn't be taken seriously, of course. What I mean is it wouldn't be taken seriously by people who don't know you personally, Mr Merrill. People who aren't familiar with your honesty and reliability in these matters. It looks like a trick, you see? And not even a very good one. Something on the order of a child's Magic EightBall.' Two weeks ago, Pop would have argued strenuously against such an idea. But that was before he had been not walked but actually propelled from that bastard McCarty's house. 'Well, if that's your final word,' Pop said, getting up and taking the camera by the strap. 'I'm very sorry you made a trip to such little purpose,' Chaffee said ... and then his horrid grin burst forth again, all rubbery lips and huge teeth shining with spit. 'I was about to make myself a Spam sandwich when you drove in. Would you care to join me, Mr Merrill? I make quite a nice one, if I do say so myself. I add a little horseradish and Bermuda onion  that's my secret  and then I ' 'I'll pass,' Pop said heavily. As in the Pus Sisters' parlor, all he really wanted right now was to get out of here and put miles between himself and this grinning idiot. Pop had a definite allergy to places where he had gambled and lost. just lately there seemed to be a lot of those. Too goddam many. 'I already had m'dinner, is what I mean to say. Got to be getting back.' Chaffee laughed fruitily. 'The lot of the toiler in the vineyards is busy but yields great bounty,' he said. Not just lately, Pop thought. Just lately it ain't yielded no fucking bounty at all. 'It's a livin anyway,' Pop replied, and was eventually allowed out of the house, which was damp and chill (what it must be like to live in such a place come February, Pop couldn't imagine) and had that mousy, mildewed smell that might be rotting curtains and sofacovers and such ... or just the smell money leaves behind when it has spent a longish period of time in a place and then departed. He thought the fresh October air, tinged with just a small taste of the lake and a stronger tang of pineneedles, had never smelled so good. He got into his car and started it up. Emory Chaffee, unlike the Pus Sister who had shown him as far as the door and then closed it quickly behind him, as if afraid the sun might strike her and turn her to dust like a vampire, was standing on the front porch, grinning his idiot grin and actually waving, as if he were seeing Pop off on a goddam ocean cruise. And, without thinking, just as he had taken the picture of (or at, anyway) the old black woman without thinking, he had snapped Chaffee and the juststartingtomoulder house which was all that remained of the Chaffee family holdings. He didn't remember picking the camera up off the seat where he had tossed it in disgust before closing his door, was not even aware that the camera was in his hands or the shutter fired until he heard the whine of the mechanism shoving the photograph out like a tongue coated with some bland gray fluid Milk of Magnesia, perhaps. That sound seemed to vibrate along his nerveendings now, making them scream; it was like the feeling you got when something too cold or hot hit a new filling. He was peripherally aware that Chaffee was laughing as if it was the best goddam joke in the world before snatching the picture from the slot in a kind of furious horror, telling himself he had imagined the momentary, blurred sound of a snarl, a sound like you might hear if a powerboat was approaching while you had your head ducked under water; telling himself he had imagined the momentary feeling that the camera had bulged in his hands, as if some huge pressure inside had pushed the sides out momentarily. He punched the glovecompartment button and threw the picture inside and then closed it so hard and fast that he tore his thumbnail all the way down to the tender quick. He pulled out jerkily, almost stalling, then almost hitting one of the hoary old spruces which flanked the house end of the long Chaffee driveway, and all the way up that driveway he thought he could hear Emory Chaffee laughing in loud mindless cheery bellows of sound Haw! Haw! Haw! Haw! His heart slammed in his chest, and his head felt as if someone was using a sledgehammer inside there. The small cluster of veins which nestled in the hollows of each temple pulsed steadily. He got himself under control little by little. Five miles, and the little man inside his head quit using the sledgehammer. Ten miles (by now he was almost halfway back to Castle Rock), and his heartbeat was back to normal. And he told himself You ain't gonna look at it. YOU AIN'T. Let the goddam thing rot in there. You don't need to look at it, and you don't need to take no more of em, either. Time to mark the thing off as a dead loss. Time to do what you should have let the boy, do in the first place. So of course when he got to the Castle View rest area, a turnout from which you could, it seemed, see all of western Maine and half of New Hampshire, he swung in and turned off his motor and opened the glove compartment and brought out the picture which he had taken with no more intent or knowledge than a man might have if he did a thing while walking in his sleep. The photograph had developed in there, of course; the chemicals inside that deceptively flat square had come to life and done their usual efficient job. Dark or light, it didn't make any difference to a Polaroid picture. The dogthing was crouched all the way down now. It was as fully coiled as it was going to get, a trigger pulled back to full cock. Its teeth had outgrown its mouth so that the thing's snarl seemed now to be not only an expression of rage but a simple necessity; how could its lips ever fully close over those teeth? How could those jaws ever chew? It looked more like a weird species of wild boar than a dog now, but what it really looked like was nothing Pop had ever seen before. It did more than hurt his eyes to look at it; it hurt his mind. It made him feel as if he was going crazy. Why not get rid of that camera right here? he thought suddenly. You can. Just get out, walk to the guardrail there, and toss her over. All gone. Goodbye. But that would have been an impulsive act, and Pop Merrill belonged to the Reasonable tribe  belonged to it body and soul, is what I mean to say. He didn't want to do anything on the spur of the moment that he might regret later, and If you don't do this, you'll regret it later. But no. And no. And no. A man couldn't run against his nature. It was unnatural. He needed time to think. To be sure. He compromised by throwing the print out instead and then drove on quickly. For a minute or two he felt as if he might throw up, but the urge passed. When it did, he felt a little more himself. Safely back in his shop, he unlocked the steel box, took out the Sun, rummaged through his keys once more, and located the one for the drawer where he kept his 'special' items. He started to put the camera inside ... and paused, brow furrowed. The image of the chopping block out back entered his mind with such clarity, every detail crisply firmed, that it was like a photograph itself. He thought Never mind all that about how a man can't run against his nature. That's crap, and you know it. It ain't in a man's nature to eat dirt, but you could eat a whole bowl of it, by the baldheaded Christ, if someone with a gun pointed at your head told you to do it. You know what time it is, chummy  time to do what you should have let the boy do in the first place. After all, It ain't like you got any investment in this. But at this, another part of his mind rose in angry, fistwaving protest. Yes I do! I do have an investment, goddammit! That kid smashed a perfectly good Polaroid camera! He may not know it, but that don't change the fact that I'm out a hundred and thirtynine bucks! 'Oh, shit on toast!' he muttered agitatedly. 'It ain't that! It ain't the fuckin money!' No  it wasn't the fucking money. He could at least admit that it wasn't the money. He could afford it; Pop could indeed have afforded a great deal, including his own mansion in Portland's Bramhall district and a brandnew MercedesBenz to go in the carport. He never would have bought those things  he pinched his pennies and chose to regard almost pathological miserliness as nothing more than good old Yankee thrift  but that didn't mean he couldn't have had them if he so chose. It wasn't about money; it was about something more important than money ever could be. It was about not getting skinned. Pop had made a life's work out of not getting skinned, and on the few occasions when he had been, he had felt like a man with red ants crawling around inside his skull. Take the business of the goddam Kraut recordplayer, for instance. When Pop found out that antique dealer from Boston  Donahue, his name had been  had gotten fifty bucks more than he'd ought to have gotten for a 1915 VictorGraff gramophone (which had actually turned out to be a much more common 1919 model), Pop had lost three hundred dollars' worth of sleep over it, sometimes plotting various forms of revenge (each more wildeyed and ridiculous than the last), sometimes just damning himself for a fool, telling himself he must really be slipping if a city man like that Donahue could skin Pop Merrill. And sometimes he imagined the fucker telling his pokerbuddies about how easy it had been, hell, they were all just a bunch of rubes up there, he believed that if you tried to sell the Brooklyn Bridge to a fellow like that country mouse Merrill in Castle Rock, the damned fool would ask 'How much?' Then him and his cronies rocking back in their chairs around that pokertable (why he always saw them around such a table in this morbid daydream Pop didn't know, but he did), smoking dollar cigars and roaring with laughter like a bunch of trolls. The business of the Polaroid was eating into him like acid, but he still wasn't ready to let go of the thing yet. Not quite yet. You're crazy! a voice shouted at him. You're crazy to go on with it! 'Damned if I'll eat it,' he muttered sulkily to that voice and to his empty shadowed store, which ticked softly to itself like a bomb in a suitcase. 'Damned if I will.' But that didn't mean he had to go haring off on any more stupid goddam trips trying to sell the sonofawhore, and he certainly didn't mean to take any more pictures with it. He judged there were at least three more 'safe' ones left in it, and there were probably as many as seven, but he wasn't going to be the one to find out. Not at all. Still, something might come up. You never knew. And it could hardly do him or anyone else any harm locked up in a drawer, could it? 'Nope,' Pop agreed briskly to himself. He dropped the camera inside, locked the drawer, repocketed his keys, and then went to the door and turned CLOSED over to OPEN with the air of a man who has finally put some nagging problem behind him for good. CHAPTER 8 The two weeks following his acquisition of Kevin Delevan's Polaroid Sun were the most aggravating, infuriating, humiliating two weeks of Pop Merrill's life. There were quite a few people in Castle Rock who would have said it couldn't have happened to a more deserving guy. Not that anyone in Castle Rock did know ... and that was just about all the consolation Pop could take. He found it cold comfort. Very cold indeed, thank you very much. But who would have ever believed the Mad Hatters would have, could have, let him down so badly? It was almost enough to make a man wonder if he was starting to slip a little. God forbid. CHAPTER 10 Pop woke up at three the next morning, bathed with sweat and peering fearfully into the dark. The clocks had just begun another weary run at the hour. It was not this sound which awakened him, although it could have done, since he was not upstairs in his bed but down below, in the shop itself. The Emporium Galorium was a cave of darkness crowded with hulking shadows created by the streetlamps outside, which managed to send just enough light through the dirty plateglass windows to create the unpleasant feeling of things hiding beyond the borders of vision. It wasn't the clocks that woke him; it was the flash. He was horrified to find himself standing in his pyjamas beside his worktable with the Polaroid Sun 660 in his hands. The 'special' drawer was open. He was aware that, although he had taken only a single picture, his finger had been pushing the button which triggered the shutter again and again and again. He would have taken a great many more than the one that protruded from the slot at the bottom of the camera but for simple good luck. There had only been a single picture left in the film pack currently in the camera. Pop started to lower his arms  he had been holding the camera pointed toward the front of the shop, the viewfinder with its minute hairline crack held up to one open, sleeping eye  and when he got them down as far as his ribcage, they began to tremble and the muscles holding the hinges of his elbows just seemed to give way. His arms fell, his fingers opened, and the camera tumbled back into the 'special' drawer with a clatter. The picture he had taken slipped from the slot and fluttered. It struck one edge of the open drawer, teetered first one way as if it would follow the camera in, and then the other. It fell on the floor. Heart attack, Pop thought incoherently. I'm gonna have a goddam Christing heart attack. He tried to raise his right arm, wanting to massage the left side of his chest with the hand on the end of it, but the arm wouldn't come. The hand on the end of it dangled as limp as a dead man at the end of a hangrope. The world wavered in and out of focus. The sound of the clocks (the tardy ones were just finishing up) faded away to distant echoes. Then the pain in his chest diminished, the light seemed to come back a little, and he realized all he was doing was trying to faint. He made to sit down in the wheeled chair behind the worktable, and the business of lowering himself into the seat, like the business of lowering the camera, began all right, but before he had gotten even halfway down, those hinges, the ones that strapped his thighs and calves together by way of his knees, also gave way and he didn't so much sit in the chair as cave into it. It rolled a foot backward, struck a crate filled with old Life and Look magazines, and stopped. Pop put his head down, the way you were supposed to do when you felt lightheaded, and time passed. He had no idea at all, then or later, how much. He might even have gone back to sleep for a little while. But when he raised his head, he was more or less all right again. There was a steady dull throbbing at his temples and behind his forehead, probably because he had stuffed his goddam noodle with blood, hanging it over so long that way, but he found he could stand up and he knew what he had to do. When the thing had gotten hold of him so badly it could make him walk in his sleep, then make him (his mind tried to revolt at that verb, that make, but he wouldn't let it) take pictures with it, that was enough. He had no idea what the goddam thing was, but one thing was clear you couldn't compromise with it. Time to do what you should have let the boy do in the first place. Yes. But not tonight. He was exhausted, drenched with sweat, and shivering. He thought he would have his work cut out for him just climbing the stairs to his apartment again, let alone swinging that sledge. He supposed he could do the job in here, simply pick it out of the drawer and dash it against the floor again and again, but there was a deeper truth, and he'd better own up to it he couldn't have any more truck with that camera tonight. The morning would be time enough ... and the camera couldn't do any damage between now and then, could it? There was no film in it. Pop shut the drawer and locked it. Then he got up slowly, looking more like a man pushing eighty than seventy, and tottered slowly to the stairs. He climbed them one at a time, resting on each, clinging to the bannister (which was none too solid itself) with one hand while he held his heavy bunch of keys on their steel ring in the other. At last he made the top. With the door shut behind him, he seemed to feel a little stronger. He went back into his bedroom and got into bed, unaware as always of the strong yellow smell of sweat and old man that puffed up when he lay down  he changed the sheets on the first of every month and called it good. I won't sleep now, he thought, and then Yes you will. You will because you can, and you can because tomorrow morning you're going to take the sledge and pound that fucking thing to pieces and there's an end to it. This thought and sleep came simultaneously, and Pop slept without dreaming, almost without moving, all the rest of that night. When he woke he was astonished to hear the clocks downstairs seeming to chime an extra stroke, all of them eight instead of seven. It wasn't until he looked at the light falling across the floor and wall in a slightly slanted oblong that he realized it really was eight; he had overslept for the first time in ten years. Then he remembered the night before. Now, in daylight, the whole episode seemed less weird; had he nearly fainted? Or was that maybe just a natural sort of weakness that came to a sleepwalker when he was unexpectedly wakened? But of course, that was it, wasn't it? A little bright morning sunshine wasn't going to change that central fact he had walked in his sleep, he had taken at least one picture and would have taken a whole slew of them if there had been more film in the pack. He got up, got dressed, and went downstairs, meaning to see the thing in pieces before he even had his morning's coffee. CHAPTER 11 Kevin wished his first visit to the twodimensional town of Polaroidsville had also been his last visit there, but that was not the case. During the thirteen nights since the first one, he'd had the dream more and more often. If the dumb dream happened to take the night off  little vacation, Kev, but seeya soon, okay?  he was apt to have it twice the next night. Now he always knew it was a dream, and as soon as it started he would tell himself that all he had to do was wake himself up, dammit, just wake yourself up! Sometimes he did wake up, and sometimes the dream just faded back into deeper sleep, but he never succeeded in waking himself up. It was always Polaroidsville now  never Oatley or Hildasville, those first two efforts of his fumbling mind to identify the place. And like the photograph, each dream took the action just a little bit further. First the man with the shoppingcart, which was never empty now even to start with but filled with a jumble of objects ... mostly clocks, but all from the Emporium Galorium, and all with the eerie look not of real things but rather of photographs of real things which had been cut out of magazines and then somehow, impossibly, paradoxically, stuffed into a shoppingcart, which, since it was as twodimensional as the objects themselves, had no breadth in which to store them. Yet there they were, and the old man hunched protectively over them and told Kevin to get out, that he was a fushing feef ... only now he also told Kevin that if he didn't get out, 'I'll sic Pop's dawg on you! Fee if I don't!' The fat woman who couldn't be fat since she was perfectly flat but who was fat anyway came next. She appeared pushing her own shoppingcart filled with Polaroid Sun cameras. She also spoke to him before he passed her. 'Be careful, boy,' she'd say in the loud but toneless voice of one who is utterly deaf, 'Pop's dog broke his leash and he's a mean un. He tore up three or four people at the Trenton Farm in Camberville before he came here. It's hard to take his pitcher, but you can't do it at all, 'less you have a cam'ra.' She would bend to get one, would sometimes get as far as holding it out, and he would reach for the camera, not knowing why the woman would think he should take the dog's picture or why he'd want to ... or maybe he was just trying to be polite? Either way, it made no difference. They both moved with the stately slowness of underwater swimmers, as dreampeople so often do, and they always just missed making connections; when Kevin thought of this part of the dream, he often thought of the famous picture of God and Adam which Michelangelo had painted on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel each of them with an arm outstretched, and each with the hand at the end of the arm also outstretched, and the forefingers almost  not quite, but almost  touching. Then she would disappear for a moment because she had no width, and when she reappeared again she was out of reach. Well just go back to her, then, Kevin would think each time the dream reached this point, but he couldn't. His feet carried him heedlessly and serenely onward to the peeling white picket fence and Pop and the dog ... only the dog was no longer a dog but some horrible mixed thing that gave off heat and smoke like a dragon and had the teeth and twisted, scarred snout of a wild pig. Pop and the Sun dog would turn toward him at the same time, and Pop would have the camera  his camera, Kevin knew, because there was a piece chipped out of the side  up to his right eye. His left eye was squinted shut. His rimless spectacles glinted on top of his head in hazy sunlight. Pop and the Sun dog had all three dimensions. They were the only things in this seedy, creepy little dreamtown that did. 'He's the one!' Pop cried in a shrill, fearful voice. 'He's the thief! Sic em, boy! Pull his fuckin guts out is what I mean to say!' And as he screamed out this last, heatless lightning flashed in the day as Pop triggered the shutter and the flash, and Kevin turned to run. The dream had stopped here the second time he had had it. Now, on each subsequent occasion, things went a little further. Again he was moving with the aquatic slowness of a performer in an underwater ballet. He felt that, if he had been outside himself, he would even have looked like a dancer, his arms turning like the blades of a propeller just starting up, his shirt twisting with his body, pulling taut across his chest and his belly at the same time he heard the shirt's tail pulling free of his pants at the small of his back with a magnified rasp like sandpaper. Then he was running back the way he came, each foot rising slowly and then floating dreamily (of course dreamily, what else, you fool? he would think at this point every time) back down until it hit the cracked and listless cement of the sidewalk, the soles of his tennis shoes flattening as they took his weight and spanking up small clouds of grit moving so slowly that he could see the individual particles revolving like atoms. He ran slowly, yes, of course, and the Sun dog, nameless stray Grendel of a thing that came from nowhere and signified nothing and had all the sense of a cyclone but existed nevertheless, chased him slowly . . . but not quite as slowly. On the third night, the dream faded into normal sleep just as Kevin began to turn his head in that dragging, maddening slow motion to see how much of a lead he had on the dog. It then skipped a night. On the following night it returned twice.