His eyes were wide, and now he looked like a kid hearing about the old twoholer outhouses which Pop and all his childhood colleagues (they were almost all colleagues; he had had few childhood friends in Castle Rock, perhaps preparing even then for his life's work of rooking the summer people and the other children somehow sensing it, like a faint smell of skunk) had taken for granted, doing your business as fast as you could in high summer because one of the wasps always circling around down there between the manna and the two holes which were the heaven from which the manna fell might at any time take a notion to plant its stinger in one of your tender little boycheeks, and also doing it as fast as you could in deep winter because your tender little boycheeks were apt to freeze solid if you didn't. Well, Pop thought, so much for the Camera of the Future. Thirtyfive years and to this kid it's interestin in the same way a backyard shithouse is interestin. 'The negative was on the back,' Pop said. 'And your positive  well, it was black and white, but it was fine black and white. It was just as crisp and clear as you'd ever want even today. And you had this little pink thing, about as long as a school eraser. as I remember; it squeegeed out some kind of chemical, smelled like ether, and you had to rub it over the pitcher as fast as you could, or that pitcher'd roll right up, like the tube in the middle of a roll of bungfodder.' Kevin burst out laughing, tickled by these pleasant antiquities. Pop quit long enough to get his pipe going again. When he had, he resumed 'A camera like that, nobody but the Polaroid people really knew what it was doing  I mean to say those people were close  but it was mechanical. You could take it apart.' He looked at Kevin's Sun with some distaste. 'And, lots of times when one went bust, that was as much as you needed. Fella'd come in with one of those and say it wouldn't work, moanin about how he'd have to send it back to the Polaroid people to get it fixed and that'd prob'ly take months and would I take a look. "Well," I'd say, "prob'ly nothin I can do, what I mean to say is nobody really knows about these cameras but the Polaroid people and they're goddam close, but I'll take a look." All the time knowin it was prob'ly just a loose screw inside that shutterhousin or maybe a fouled spring, or hell, maybe junior slathered some peanut butter in the film compartment.' One of his bright birdeyes dropped in a wink so quick and so marvellously sly that, Kevin thought, if you hadn't known he was talking about summer people, you would have thought it was your paranoid imagination, or, more likely, missed it entirely. 'What I mean to say is you had your perfect situation,' Pop said. 'If you could fix it, you were a goddam wonderworker. Why, I have put eight dollars and fifty cents in my pocket for takin a couple of little pieces of potatochip out from between the trigger and the shutterspring, my son, and the woman who brought that camera in kissed me on the lips. Right ... on ... the lips.' Kevin observed Pop's eye drop momentarily closed again behind the semitransparent mat of blue smoke. 'And of course, if it was somethin you couldn't fix, they didn't hold it against you because, what I mean to say, they never really expected you to be able to do nothin in the first place. You was only a last resort before they put her in a box and stuffed newspapers around her to keep her from bein broke even worse in the mail, and shipped her off to Schenectady. 'But  this camera.' He spoke in the ritualistic tone of distaste all philosophers of the crackerbarrel, whether in Athens of the golden age or in a smalltown junkshop during this current one of brass, adopt to express their view of entropy without having to come right out and state it. 'Wasn't put together, son. What I mean to say is it was poured. I could maybe pop the lens, and will if you want me to, and I did look in the film compartment, although I knew I wouldn't see a goddam thing wrong  that I recognized, at least  and I didn't. But beyond that I can't go. I could take a hammer and wind it right to her, could break it, what I mean to say, but fix it?' He spread his hands in pipesmoke. 'Nossir.' 'Then I guess I'll just have to ' return it after all, he meant to finish, but Pop broke in. 'Anyway, son, I think you knew that. What I mean to say is you're a bright boy, you can see when a thing's all of a piece. I don't think you brought that camera in to be fixed. I think you know that even if it wasn't all of a piece, a man couldn't fix what that thing's doing, at least not with a screwdriver. I think you brought it in to ask me if I knew what it's up to.' 'Do you?' Kevin asked. He was suddenly tense all over. 'I might,' Pop Merrill said calmly. He bent over the pile of photographs twentyeight of them now, counting the one Kevin had snapped to demonstrate, and the one Pop had snapped to demonstrate to himself. 'These in order?' 'Not really. Pretty close, though. Does it matter?' 'I think so,' Pop said. 'They're a little bit different, ain't they? Not much, but a little.' 'Yeah,' Kevin said. 'I can see the difference in some of them, but . 'Do you know which one is the first? I could prob'ly figure it out for myself, but time is money, son.' 'That's easy,' Kevin said, and picked one out of the untidy little pile. 'See the frosting?' He pointed at a small brown spot on the picture's white edging. 'Ayup.' Pop didn't spare the dab of frosting more than a glance. He looked closely at the photograph, and after a moment he opened the drawer of his worktable. Tools were littered untidily about inside. To one side, in its own space, was an object wrapped in jeweler's velvet. Pop took this out, folded the cloth back, and removed a large magnifying glass with a switch in its base. He bent over the Polaroid and pushed the switch. A bright circle of light fell on the picture's surface. 'That's neat!' Kevin said. 'Ayup,' Pop said again. Kevin could tell that for Pop he was no longer there. Pop was studying the picture closely. If one had not known the odd circumstances of its taking, the picture would hardly have seemed to warrant such close scrutiny. Like most photographs which are taken with a decent camera, good film, and by a photographer at least intelligent enough to keep his finger from blocking the lens, it was clear, understandable ... and, like so many Polaroids, oddly undramatic. It was a picture in which you could identify and name each object, but its content was as flat as its surface. It was not well composed, but composition wasn't what was wrong with it  that undramatic flatness could hardly be called wrong at all, any more than a real day in a real life could be called wrong because nothing worthy of even a madefortelevision movie happened during its course. As in so many Polaroids, the things in the picture were only there, like an empty chair on a porch or an unoccupied child's swing in a back yard or a passengerless car sitting at an unremarkable curb without even a flat tire to make it interesting or unique. What was wrong with the picture was the feeling that it was wrong. Kevin had remembered the sense of unease he had felt while composing his subjects for the picture he meant to take, and the ripple of gooseflesh up his back when, with the glare of the flashbulb still lighting the room, he had thought, It's mine. That was what was wrong, and as with the man in the moon you can't unsee once you've seen it, so, he was discovering, you couldn't unfeel certain feelings ... and when it came to these pictures, those feelings were bad. Kevin thought It's like there was a wind  very soft, very cold  blowing out of that picture. For the first time, the idea that it might be something supernatural  that this was part of a Manifestation  did something more than just intrigue him. For the first time he found himself wishing he had simply let this thing go. It's mine  that was what he had thought when his finger had pushed the shutterbutton for the first time. Now he found himself wondering if maybe he hadn't gotten that backward. I'm scared of it. Of what it's doing. That made him mad, and he bent over Pop Merrill's shoulder, hunting as grimly as a man who has lost a diamond in a sandpile, determined that, no matter what he saw (always supposing he should see something new, and he didn't think he would; he had studied all these photographs often enough now to believe he had seen all there was to see in them), he would look at it, study it, and under no circumstances allow himself to unsee it. Even if he could ... and a dolorous voice inside suggested very strongly that the time for unseeing was now past, possibly forever. What the picture showed was a large black dog in front of a white picket fence. The picket fence wasn't going to be white much longer, unless someone in that flat Polaroid world painted or at least whitewashed it. That didn't seem likely; the fence looked untended, forgotten. The tops of some pickets were broken off. Others sagged loosely outward. The dog was on a sidewalk in front of the fence. His hindquarters were to the viewer. His tail, long and bushy, drooped. He appeared to be smelling one of the fencepickets  probably, Kevin thought, because the fence was what his dad called a 'letterdrop,' a place where many dogs would lift their legs and leave mystic yellow squirts of message before moving on. The dog looked like a stray to Kevin. Its coat was long and tangled and sown with burdocks. One of its ears had the crumpled look of an old battlescar. Its shadow trailed long enough to finish outside the frame on the weedy, patchy lawn inside the picket fence. The shadow made Kevin think the picture had been taken not long after dawn or not long before sunset; with no idea of the direction the photographer (what photographer, haha) had been facing, it was impossible to tell which, just that he (or she) must have been standing only a few degrees shy of due east or west. There was something in the grass at the far left of the picture which looked like a child's red rubber ball. It was inside the fence, and enough behind one of the lackluster clumps of grass so it was hard to tell. And that was all. 'Do you recognize anything?' Pop asked, cruising his magnifying glass slowly back and forth over the photo's surface. Now the dog's hindquarters swelled to the size of hillocks tangled with wild and ominously exotic black undergrowth; now three or four of the scaly pickets became the size of old telephone poles; now, suddenly, the object behind the clump of grass clearly became a child's ball (although under Pop's glass it was as big as a soccer ball) Kevin could even see the stars which girdled its middle in upraised rubber lines. So something new was revealed under Pop's glass, and in a few moments Kevin would see something else himself, without it. But that was later. 'Jeez, no,' Kevin said. 'How could I, Mr Merrill?' 'Because there are things here,' Pop said patiently. His glass went on cruising. Kevin thought of a movie he had seen once where the cops sent out a searchlightequipped helicopter to look for escaped prisoners. 'A dog, a sidewalk, a picket fence that needs paintin or takin down, a lawn that needs tendin. The sidewalk ain't much  you can't even see all of it  and the house, even the foundation, ain't in the frame, but what I mean to say is there's that dog. You recognize it?' 'No.' 'The fence?' 'No.' 'What about that red rubber ball? What about that, son?' 'No ... but you look like you think I should.' 'I look like I thought you might,' Pop said. 'You never had a ball like that when you were a tyke?' 'Not that I remember, no.' 'You got a sister, you said.' 'Megan.' 'She never had a ball like that?' 'I don't think so. I never took that much interest in Meg's toys. She had a BoLo bouncer once, and the ball on the end of it was red, but a different shade. Darker.' 'Ayuh. I know what a ball like that looks like. This ain't one. And that mightn't be your lawn?' 'Jes  I mean jeepers, no.' Kevin felt a little offended. He and his dad took good care of the lawn around their house. It was a deep green and would stay that way, even under the fallen leaves, until at least midOctober. 'We don't have a picket fence, anyway.' And if we did, he thought, it wouldn't look like that mess. Pop let go of the switch in the base of the magnifying glass, placed it on the square of jeweler's velvet, and with a care which approached reverence folded the sides over it. He returned it to its former place in the drawer and closed the drawer. He looked at Kevin closely. He had put his pipe aside, and there was now no smoke to obscure his eyes, which were still sharp but not twinkling anymore. 'What I mean to say is, could it have been your house before you owned it, do you think? Ten years ago ' 'We owned it ten years ago,' Kevin replied, bewildered. 'Well, twenty? Thirty? What I mean to say, do you recognize how the land lies? Looks like it climbs a little.' 'Our front lawn ' He thought deeply, then shook his head. 'No, ours is flat. If it does anything, it goes down a little. Maybe that's why the cellar ships a little water in a wet spring.' 'Ayuh, ayuh, could be. What about the back lawn?' 'There's no sidewalk back there,' Kevin said. 'And on the sides ' He broke off. 'You're trying to find out if my camera's taking pictures of the past!' he said, and for the first time he was really, actively frightened. He rubbed his tongue on the roof of his mouth and seemed to taste metal. 'I was just askin.' Pop rapped his fingers beside the photographs, and when he spoke, it seemed to be more to himself than to Kevin. 'You know,' he said, 'some goddam funny things seem to happen from time to time with two gadgets we've come to take pretty much for granted. I ain't sayin they do happen; only if they don't, there are a lot of liars and outnout hoaxers in the world.' 'What gadgets?' 'Tape recorders and Polaroid cameras,' Pop said, still seeming to talk to the pictures, or himself, and there was no Kevin in this dusty clockdrumming space at the back of the Emporium Galorium at all. 'Take tape recorders. Do you know how many people claim to have recorded the voices of dead folks on tape recorders?' 'No,' Kevin said. He didn't particularly mean for his own voice to come out hushed, but it did; he didn't seem to have a whole lot of air in his lungs to speak with, for some reason or other. 'Me neither,' Pop said, stirring the photographs with one finger. It was blunt and gnarled, a finger which looked made for rude and clumsy motions and operations, for poking people and knocking vases off endtables and causing nosebleeds if it tried to do so much as hook a humble chunk of dried snot from one of its owner's nostrils. Yet Kevin had watched the man's hands and thought there was probably more grace in that one finger than in his sister Meg's entire body (and maybe in his own; Clan Delevan was not known for its lightfootedness or handedness, which was probably one reason why he thought that image of his father so nimbly catching his mother on the way down had stuck with him, and might forever). Pop Merrill's finger looked as if it would at any moment sweep all the photographs onto the floor  by mistake; this sort of clumsy finger would always poke and knock and tweak by mistake  but it did not. The Polaroids seemed to barely stir in response to its restless movements. Supernatural, Kevin thought again, and shivered a little. An actual shiver, surprising and dismaying and a little embarrassing even if Pop had not seen it. 'But there's even a way they do it,' Pop said, and then, as if Kevin had asked 'Who? Damn if I know. I guess some of them are "psychic investigators," or at least call themselves that or some such, but I guess it's more'n likely most of em are just playin around, like folks that use Ouija Boards at parties.' He looked up at Kevin grimly, as if rediscovering him. 'You got a Ouija, son?' 'No.' 'Ever played with one?' 'No.' 'Don't,' Pop said more grimly than ever. 'Fuckin things are dangerous.' Kevin didn't dare tell the old man he hadn't the slightest idea what a weegee board was. 'Anyway, they set up a tape machine to record in an empty room. It's supposed to be an old house, is what I mean to say, one with a History, if they can find it. Do you know what I mean when I say a house with a History, son?' 'I guess ... like a haunted house?' Kevin hazarded. He found he was sweating lightly, as he had done last year every time Mrs Whittaker announced a pop quiz in Algebra 1. 'Well, that'll do. These ... people ... like it best if it's a house with a Violent History, but they'll take what they can get. Anyhow, they set up the machine and record that empty room. Then, the next day  they always do it at night is what I mean to say, they ain't happy unless they can do it at night, and midnight if they can get it  the next day they play her back.' 'An empty room?' 'Sometimes,' Pop said in a musing voice that might or might not have disguised some deeper feeling, 'there are voices.' Kevin shivered again. There were hieroglyphics on the plinth after all. Nothing you'd want to read, but ... yeah. They were there. 'Real voices?' 'Usually imagination,' Pop said dismissively. 'But once or twice I've heard people I trust say they've heard real voices.' 'But you never have?' 'Once,' Pop said shortly, and said nothing else for so long Kevin was beginning to think he was done when he added, 'It was one word. Clear as a bell. 'Twas recorded in the parlor of an empty house in Bath. Man killed his wife there in 1946.' 'What was the word?' Kevin asked, knowing he would not be told just as surely as he knew no power on earth, certainly not his own willpower, could have kept him from asking. But Pop did tell. 'Basin.' Kevin blinked. 'Basin?' 'Ayuh.' 'That doesn't mean anything.' 'It might,' Pop said calmly, 'if you know he cut her throat and then held her head over a basin to catch the blood.' 'Oh my God!' 'Ayuh.' 'Oh my God, really?' Pop didn't bother answering that. 'It couldn't have been a fake?' Pop gestured with the stem of his pipe at the Polaroids. 'Are those?' 'Oh my God.' 'Polaroids, now,' Pop said, like a narrator moving briskly to a new chapter in a novel and reading the words Meanwhile, in another part of the forest, 'I've seen pitchers with people in em that the other people in the pitcher swear weren't there with em when the pitcher was taken. And there's one  this is a famous one  that a lady took over in England. What she did was snap a pitcher of some foxhunters comin back home at the end of the day. You see em, about twenty in all, comin over a little wooden bridge. It's a treelined country road on both sides of that bridge. The ones in front are off the bridge already. And over on the right of the pitcher, standin by the road, there's a lady in a long dress and a hat with a veil on it so you can't see her face and she's got her pocketbook over her arm. Why, you can even see she's wearin a locket on her bosom, or maybe it's a watch. 'Well, when the lady that took the pitcher saw it, she got wicked upset, and wasn't nobody could blame her, son, because what I mean to say is she meant to take a pitcher of those foxhunters comin home and no one else, because there wasn't nobody else there. Except in the pitcher there is. And when you look real close, it seems like you can see the trees right through that lady.' He's making all this up, putting me on, and when I leave he'll have a great big horselaugh, Kevin thought, knowing Pop Merrill was doing nothing of the sort. 'The lady that took that pitcher was stayin at one of those big English homes like they have on the educationTV shows, and when she showed that pitcher, I heard the man of the house fainted dead away. That part could be made up. Prob'ly is. Sounds made up, don't it? But I seen that pitcher in an article next to a painted portrait of that fella's greatgrandmother, and it could be her, all right. Can't tell for certain because of the veil. But it could be.' 'Could be a hoax, too,' Kevin said faintly. 'Could be,' Pop said indifferently. 'People get up to all sorts of didos. Lookit my nephew, there, for instance, Ace.' Pop's nose wrinkled. 'Doin four years in Shawshank, and for what? Bustin into The Mellow Tiger. He got up to didos and Sheriff Pangborn. slammed him in the jug for it. Little ringmeat got just what he deserved.' Kevin, displaying a wisdom far beyond his years, said nothing. 'But when ghosts show up in photographs, son  or, like you say, what people claim to be ghosts  it's almost always in Polaroid photographs. And it almost always seems to be by accident. Now your pitchers of flyin saucers and that Lock Nest Monster, they almost always show up in the other kind. The kind some smart fella can get up to didos with in a darkroom.' He dropped Kevin a third wink, expressing all the didos (whatever they were) an unscrupulous photographer might get up to in a wellequipped darkroom. Kevin thought of asking Pop if it was possible someone could get up to didos with a weegee and decided to continue keeping his mouth shut. It still seemed by far the wisest course. 'All by way of sayin I thought I'd ask if you saw somethin you knew in these Polaroid pitchers.' 'I don't, though,' Kevin said so earnestly that he believed Pop would believe he was lying, as his mom always did when he made the tactical mistake of even controlled vehemence. 'Ayuh, ayuh,' Pop said, believing him so dismissively Kevin was almost irritated. 'Well,' Kevin said after a moment which was silent except for the fifty thousand ticking clocks, 'I guess that's it, huh?' 'Maybe not,' Pop said. 'What I mean to say is I got me a little idear. You mind takin some more pitchers with that camera?' 'What good is it? They're all the same.' 'That's the point. They ain't.' Kevin opened his mouth, then closed it. 'I'll even chip in for the film,' Pop said, and when he saw the amazed look on Kevin's face he quickly qualified 'A little, anyway.' 'How many pictures would you want?' 'Well, you got ... what? Twentyeight already, is that right?' 'Yes, I think so.' 'Thirty more,' Pop said after a moment's thought. 'Why?' 'Ain't gonna tell you. Not right now.' He produced a heavy purse that was hooked to a beltloop on a steel chain. He opened it and took out a tendollar bill, hesitated, and added two ones with obvious reluctance. 'Guess that'd cover half of it.' Yeah, right, Kevin thought. 'If you really are int'rested in the trick that camera's doing, I guess you'd pony up the rest, wouldn't you?' Pop's eyes gleamed at him like the eyes of an old, curious cat. Kevin understood the man did more than expect him to say yes; to Pop it was inconceivable that he could say no. Kevin thought, If I said no he wouldn't hear it; he'd say 'Good, that's agreed, then,' and I'd end up back on the sidewalk with his money in my pocket whether I wanted it or not. And he did have his birthday money. All the same, there was that chill wind to think about. That wind that seemed to blow not from the surface but right out of those photographs in spite of their deceptively flat, deceptively shiny surfaces. He felt that wind coming from them despite their mute declaration which averred We are Polaroids, and for no reason we can tell or even understand, we show only the undramatic surfaces of things. That wind was there. What about that wind? Kevin hesitated a moment longer and the bright eyes behind the rimless spectacles measured him. I ain't gonna ask you if you're a man or a mouse, Pop Merrill's eyes said. You're fifteen years old, and what I mean to say is at fifteen you may not be a man yet, not quite, but you are too goddam old to be a mouse and both of us know it. And besides you're not from Away; you're from town, just like me. 'Sure,' Kevin said with a hollow lightness in his voice. It fooled neither of them. 'I can get the film tonight, I guess, and bring the pictures in tomorrow, after school.' 'Nope,' Pop said. 'You're closed tomorrow?' 'Nope,' Pop said, and because he was from town, Kevin waited patiently. 'You're thinkin about takin thirty pictures all at once, aren't you?' 'I guess so.' But Kevin hadn't thought about it; he had simply taken it for granted. 'That ain't the way I want you to do it,' Pop said. 'It don't matter where you take them, but it does matter when. Here. Lemme figure.' Pop figured, and then even wrote down a list of times, which Kevin pocketed. 'So!' Pop said, rubbing his hands briskly together so that they made a dry sound that was like two pieces of usedup sandpaper rubbing together. 'You'll see me in ... oh, three days or so?' 'Yes . . . I guess so.' 'I'll bet you'd just as lief wait until Monday after school, anyway,' Pop said. He dropped Kevin a fourth wink, slow and sly and humiliating in the extreme. 'So your friends don't see you comin in here and tax you with it, is what I mean to say.' Kevin flushed and dropped his eyes to the worktable and began to gather up the Polaroids so his hands would have something to do. When he was embarrassed and they didn't, he cracked his knuckles. 'I ' He began some sort of absurd protest that would convince neither of them and then stopped, staring down at one of the photos. 'What?' Pop asked. For the first time since Kevin had approached him, Pop sounded entirely human, but Kevin hardly heard his words, much less his tone of faint alarm. 'Now you look like you seen a ghost, boy.' 'No,' Kevin said. 'No ghost. I see who took the picture. Who really took the picture.' 'What in glory are you talking about?' Kevin pointed to a shadow. He, his father, his mother, Meg, and apparently Mr Merrill himself had taken it for the shadow of a tree that wasn't itself in the frame. But it wasn't a tree. Kevin saw that now, and what you had seen could never be unseen. More hieroglyphics on the plinth. 'I don't see what you're gettin at,' Pop said. But Kevin knew the old man knew he was getting at something, which was why he sounded put out. 'Look at the shadow of the dog first,' Kevin said. 'Then look at this one here again.' He tapped the left side of the photograph. 'In the picture, the sun is either going down or coming up. That makes all the shadows long, and it's hard to tell what's throwing them. But looking at it, just now, it clicked home for me.' 'What clicked home, son?' Pop reached for the drawer, probably meaning to get the magnifying glass with the light in it again ... and then stopped. All at once he didn't need it. All at once it had clicked into place for him, too. 'It's the shadow of a man, ain't it?' Pop said. 'I be go to hell if that one ain't the shadow of a man.' 'Or a woman. You can't tell. Those are legs, I'm sure they are, but they could belong to a woman wearing pants. Or even a kid. With the shadow running so long ' 'Ayuh, you can't tell.' Kevin said, 'It's the shadow of whoever took it, isn't it?' 'Ayuh.' 'But it wasn't me,' Kevin said. 'It came out of my camera  all of them did  but I didn't take it. So who did, Mr Merrill? Who did?' 'Call me Pop,' the old man said absently, looking at the shadow in the picture, and Kevin felt his chest swell with pleasure as those few clocks still capable of running a little fast began to signal the others that, weary as they might be, it was time to charge the halfhour. CHAPTER 3 When Kevin arrived back at the Emporium Galorium with the photographs on Monday after school, the leaves had begun to turn color. He had been fifteen for almost two weeks and the novelty had worn off. The novelty of that plinth, the supernatural, had not, but this wasn't anything he counted among his blessings. He had finished taking the schedule of photographs Pop had given him, and by the time he had, he had seen clearly  clearly enough, anyway  why Pop had wanted him to take them at intervals the first ten on the hour, then let the camera rest, the second ten every two hours, and the third at threehour intervals. He'd taken the last few that day at school. He had seen something else as well, something none of them could have seen at first; it was not clearly visible until the final three pictures. They had scared him so badly he had decided, even before taking the pictures to the Emporium Galorium, that he wanted to get rid of the Sun 660. Not exchange it; that was the last thing he wanted to do, because it would mean the camera would be out of his hands and hence out of his control. He couldn't have that. It's mine, he had thought, and the thought kept recurring, but it wasn't a true thought. If it was  if the Sun only took pictures of the black breedless dog by the white picket fence when he, Kevin, was the one pushing the trigger  that would have been one thing. But that wasn't the case. Whatever the nasty magic inside the Sun might be, he was not its sole initiator. His father had taken the same (well, almost the same) picture, and so had Pop Merrill, and so had Meg when Kevin had let her take a couple of the pictures on Pop's carefully timed schedule. 'Did you number em, like I asked?' Pop asked when Kevin delivered them. 'Yes, one to fiftyeight,' Kevin said. He thumbed through the stack of photographs, showing Pop the small circled numbers in the lower lefthand corner of each. 'But I don't know if it matters. I've decided to get rid of the camera.' 'Get rid of it? That ain't what you mean.' 'No. I guess not. I'm going to break it up with a sledgehammer.' Pop looked at him with those shrewd little eyes. 'That so?' 'Yes,' Kevin said, meeting the shrewd gaze steadfastly. 'Last week I would have laughed at the idea, but I'm not laughing now. I think the thing is dangerous.' 'Well, I guess you could be right, and I guess you could tape a charge of dynamite to it and blow it to smithereens if you wanted. It's yours, is what I mean to say. But why don't you hold off a little while? There's somethin I want to do with these pitchers. You might be interested.' 'What?' 'I druther not say,' Pop answered, 'case it don't turn out. But I might have somethin by the end of the week that'd help you decide better, one way or the other.' 'I have decided,' Kevin said, and tapped something that had shown up in the last two photographs. 'What is it?' Pop asked. 'I've looked at it with m'glass, and I feel like I should know what it is  it's like a name you can't quite remember but have right on the tip of your tongue, is what I mean to say  but I don't quite.' 'I suppose I could hold off until Friday or so,' Kevin said, choosing not to answer the old man's question. 'I really don't want to hold off much longer.' 'Scared?' 'Yes,' Kevin said simply. 'I'm scared.' 'You told your folks?' 'Not all of it, no.' 'Well, you might want to. Might want to tell your dad, anyway, is what I mean to say. You got time to think on it while I take care of what it is I want to take care of.' 'No matter what you want to do, I'm going to put my dad's sledgehammer on it come Friday,' Kevin said. 'I don't even want a camera anymore. Not a Polaroid or any other kind.' 'Where is it now?' 'In my bureau drawer. And that's where it's going to stay.' 'Stop by the store here on Friday,' Pop said. 'Bring the camera with you. We'll take a look at this little idear of mine, and then, if you want to bust the goddam thing up, I'll provide the sledgehammer myself. No charge. Even got a chopping block out back you can set it on.' 'That's a deal,' Kevin said, and smiled. 'Just what have you told your folks about all this?' 'That I'm still deciding. I didn't want to worry them. My mom, especially.' Kevin looked at him curiously. 'Why did you say I might want to tell my dad?' 'You bust up that camera, your father is going to be mad at you,' Pop said. 'That ain't so bad, but he's maybe gonna think you're a little bit of a fool, too.


Or an old maid, squallin burglar to the police on account of a creaky board is what I mean to say.' Kevin flushed a little, thinking of how angry his father had gotten when the idea of the supernatural had come up, then sighed. He hadn't thought of it in that light at all, but now that he did, he thought Pop was probably right. He didn't like the idea of his father being mad at him, but he could live with it. The idea that his father might think him a coward, a fool, or both, though ... that was a different kettle of fish altogether. Pop was watching him shrewdly, reading these thoughts as easily as a man might read the headlines on the front pages of a tabloid newspaper as they crossed Kevin's face. 'You think he could meet you here around four in the afternoon on Friday?' 'No way,' Kevin said. 'He works in Portland. He hardly ever gets home before six.' 'I'll give him a call, if you want,' Pop said. 'He'll come if I call.' Kevin gave him a wideeyed stare. Pop smiled thinly. 'Oh, I know him,' he said. 'Know him of old. He don't like to let on about me any more than you do, and I understand that, but what I mean to say is I know him. I know a lot of people in this town. You'd be surprised, son.' 'How?' 'Did him a favor one time,' Pop said. He popped a match alight with his thumbnail, and veiled those eyes behind enough smoke so you couldn't tell if it was amusement, sentiment, or contempt in them. 'What kind of favor?' 'That,' Pop said, 'is between him and me. Just like this business here'  he gestured at the pile of photographs 'is between me and you. That's what I mean to say.' 'Well ... okay ... I guess. Should I say anything to him?' 'Nope!' Pop said in his chipper way. 'You let me take care of everything.' And for a moment, in spite of the obfuscating pipesmoke, there was something in Pop Merrill's eyes Kevin Delevan didn't care for. He went out, a sorely confused boy who knew only one thing for sure he wanted this to be over. When he was gone, Pop sat silent and moveless for nearly five minutes. He allowed his pipe to go out in his mouth and drummed his fingers, which were nearly as knowing and talented as those of a concert violinist but masqueraded as equipment which should more properly have belonged to a digger of ditches or a pourer of cement, next to the stack of photographs. As the smoke dissipated, his eyes stood out clearly, and they were as cold as ice in a December puddle. Abruptly he put the pipe in its holder and called a cameraandvideo shop in Lewiston. He asked two questions. The answer to both of them was yes. Pop hung up the phone and went back to drumming his fingers on the table beside the Polaroids. What he was planning wasn't really fair to the boy, but the boy had uncovered the corner of something he not only didn't understand but didn't want to understand. Fair or not, Pop didn't believe he intended to let the boy do what the boy wanted to do. He hadn't decided what he himself meant to do, not yet, not entirely, but it was wise to be prepared. That was always wise. He sat and drummed his fingers and wondered what that thing was the boy had seen. He had obviously felt Pop would know  or might know  but Pop hadn't a clue. The boy might tell him on Friday. Or not. But if the boy didn't, the father, to whom Pop had once loaned four hundred dollars to cover a bet on a basketball game, a bet he had lost and which his wife knew nothing about, certainly would. If, that was, he could. Even the best of fathers didn't know all about their sons anymore once those sons were fifteen or so, but Pop thought Kevin was a very young fifteen, and that his dad knew most things ... or could find them out. He smiled and drummed his fingers and all the clocks began to charge wearily at the hour of five. CHAPTER 5 'What was it?' Kevin asked as they prepared to go. They had the house to themselves. Meg was at her ballet class, and it was Mrs Delevan's day to play bridge with her friends. She would come home at five with a large loaded pizza and news of who was getting divorced or at least thinking of it. 'None of your business,' Mr Delevan said in a rough voice which was both angry and embarrassed. The day was chilly. Mr Delevan had been looking for his fight jacket. Now he stopped and turned around and looked at his son, who was standing behind him, wearing his own jacket and holding the Sun camera in one hand. 'All right,' he said. 'I never pulled that crap on you before and I guess I don't want to start now. You know what I mean.' 'Yes,' Kevin said, and thought I know exactly what you're talking about, is what I mean to say. 'Your mother doesn't know anything about this.' 'I won't tell her.' 'Don't say that,' his father told him sharply. 'Don't start down that road or you'll never stop.' 'But you said you never' 'No, I never told her,' his father said, finding the jacket at last and shrugging into it. 'She never asked and I never told her. If she never asks you, you never have to tell her. That sound like a bullshit qualification to you?' 'Yeah,' Kevin said. 'To tell you the truth, it does.' 'Okay,' Mr Delevan said. 'Okay ... but that's the way we do it. If the subject ever comes up, you  we  have to tell. If it doesn't, we don't. That's just the way we do things in the grownup world. It sounds fucked up, I guess, and sometimes it is fucked up, but that's how we do it. Can you live with that?' 'Yes. I guess so.' 'Good. Let's go.' They walked down the driveway side by side, zipping their jackets. The wind played with the hair at John Delevan's temples, and Kevin noted for the first time  with uneasy surprise  that his father was starting to go gray there. 'It was no big deal, anyway,' Mr Delevan said. He might almost have been talking to himself. 'It never is with Pop Merrill. He isn't a bigdeal kind of guy, if you know what I mean.' Kevin nodded. 'He's a fairly wealthy man, you know, but that junkshop of his isn't the reason why. He's Castle Rock's version of Shylock.' 'Of who?' 'Never mind. You'll read the play sooner or later if education hasn't gone entirely to hell. He loans money at interest rates that are higher than the law allows.' 'Why would people borrow from him?' Kevin asked as they walked toward downtown under trees from which leaves of red and purple and gold sifted slowly down. 'Because,' Mr Delevan said sourly, 'they can't borrow anyplace else.' 'You mean their credit's no good?' 'Something like that.' 'But we ... you . . .' 'Yeah. We're doing all right now. But we weren't always doing all right. When your mother and I were first married, how we were doing was all the way across town from all right.' He fell silent again for a time, and Kevin didn't interrupt him. 'Well, there was a guy who was awful proud of the Celtics one year,' his father said. He was looking down at his feet, as if afraid to step on a crack and break his mother's back. 'They were going into the playoffs against the Philadelphia SeventySixers. They  the Celtics  were favored to win, but by a lot less than usual. I had a feeling the SeventySixers were going to take them, that it was their year.' He looked quickly at his son, almost snatching the glance as a shoplifter might take a small but fairly valuable item and tuck it into his coat, and then went back to minding the cracks in the sidewalk again. They were now walking down Castle Hill and toward the town's single signalfight at the crossing of Lower Main Street and Watermill Lane. Beyond the intersection, what locals called the Tin Bridge crossed Castle Stream. Its overstructure cut the deepblue autumn sky into neat geometrical shapes. 'I guess it's that feeling, that special sureness, that infects the poor souls who lose their bank accounts, their houses, their cars, even the clothes they stand up in at casinos and backroom poker games. That feeling that you got a telegram from God. I only got it that once, and I thank God for that. 'In those days I'd make a friendly bet on a football game or the World Series with somebody, five dollars was the most, I think, and usually it was a lot less than that, just a token thing, a quarter or maybe a pack of cigarettes.' This time it was Kevin who shoplifted a glance, only Mr Delevan caught it, cracks in the sidewalk or no cracks. 'Yes, I smoked in those days, too. Now I don't smoke and I don't bet. Not since that last time. That last time cured me. 'Back then your mother and I had only been married two years. You weren't born yet. I was working as a surveyor's assistant, bringing home just about a hundred and sixteen dollars a week. Or that was what I cleared, anyway, when the government finally let go of it. 'This fellow who was so proud of the Celtics was one of the engineers. He even wore one of those green Celtics warmup jackets to work, the kind that have the shamrock on the back. The week before the playoffs, he kept saying he'd like to find someone brave enough and stupid enough to bet on the SeventySixers, because he had four hundred dollars just waiting to catch him a dividend. 'That voice inside me kept getting louder and louder, and the day before the championship series started, I went up to him on lunchbreak. My heart felt like it was going to tear right out of my chest, I was so scared.' 'Because you didn't have four hundred dollars,' Kevin said. 'The other guy did, but you didn't.' He was looking at his father openly now, the camera completely forgotten for the first time since his first visit to Pop Merrill. The wonder of what the Sun 660 was doing was lost  temporarily, anyway  in this newer, brighter wonder as a young man his father had done something spectacularly stupid, just as Kevin knew other men did, just as he might do himself someday, when he was on his own and there was no adult member of the Reasonable tribe to protect him from some terrible impulse, some misbegotten instinct. His father, it seemed, had briefly been a member of the Instinctive tribe himself. It was hard to believe, but wasn't this the proof? 'Right.' 'But you bet him.' 'Not right away,' his father said. 'I told him I thought the SeventySixers would take the championship, but four hundred bucks was a lot to risk for a guy who was only a surveyor's assistant.' 'But you never came right out and told him you didn't have the money.' 'I'm afraid it went a little further than that, Kevin. I implied I did have it. I said I couldn't afford to lose four hundred dollars, and that was disingenuous, to say the least. I told him I couldn't risk that kind of money on an even bet  still not lying, you see, but skating right up to the edge of the lie. Do you see?' 'Yes.' 'I don't know what would have happened  maybe nothing  if the foreman hadn't rung the backtowork bell right then. But he did, and this engineer threw up his hands and said, "I'll give you twotoone, sonny, if that's what you want. It don't matter to me. It's still gonna be four hundred in my pocket." And before I knew what was happening we'd shook on it with half a dozen men watching and I was in the soup, for better or worse. And going home that night I thought of your mother, and what she'd say if she knew, and I pulled over to the shoulder of the road in the old Ford I had back then and I puked out the door.' A police car came rolling slowly down Harrington Street. Norris Ridgewick was driving and Andy Clutterbuck was riding shotgun. Clut raised his hand as the cruiser turned left on Main Street. John and Kevin Delevan raised their hands in return, and autumn drowsed peacefully around them as if John Delevan had never sat in the open door of his old Ford and puked into the roaddust between his own feet. They crossed Main Street. 'Well ... you could say I got my money's worth, anyway. The Sixers took it right to the last few seconds of the seventh game, and then one of those Irish bastards  I forget which one it was  stole the ball from Hal Greer and went to the hole with it and there went the four hundred dollars I didn't have. When I paid that goddam engineer off the next day he said he "got a little nervous there near the end." That was all. I could have popped his eyes out with my thumbs.' 'You paid him off the next day? How'd you do that?' 'I told you, it was like a fever. Once we shook hands on the bet, the fever passed. I hoped like hell I'd win that bet, but I knew I'd have to think like I was going to lose. There was a lot more at stake than just four hundred dollars. There was the question of my job, of course, and what might happen if I wasn't able to pay off the guy I'd bet with. He was an engineer, after all, and technically my boss. That fellow had just enough son of a bitch in him to have fired my ass if I didn't pay the wager. It wouldn't have been the bet, but he would have found something, and it would have been something that would go on my workrecord in big red letters, too. But that wasn't the biggest thing. Not at all.' 'What was?' 'Your mother. Our marriage. When you're young and don't have either a pot to piss in or a window to throw it out of, a marriage is under strain all the time. It doesn't matter how much you love each other, that marriage is like an overloaded packhorse and you know it can fall to its knees or even roll over dead if all the wrong things happen at all the wrong times. I don't think she would have divorced me over a fourhundreddollar bet, but I'm glad I never had to find out for sure. So when the fever passed, I saw that I might have bet a little more than four hundred dollars. I might just have bet my whole goddam future.' They were approaching the Emporium Galorium. There was a bench on the verge of the grassy town common, and Mr Delevan gestured for Kevin to sit down. 'This won't take long,' he said, and then laughed. It was a grating, compressed sound, like an inexperienced driver working a transmission lever. 'It hurts too much to stretch out, even after all these years.' So they sat on the bench and Mr Delevan finished the story of how he happened to know Pop Merrill while they looked across the grassy common with the bandstand in the middle. 'I went to him the same night I made the bet,' he said. 'I told your mother I was going out for cigarettes. I went after dark, so no one would see me. From town, I mean. They would have known I was in some kind of trouble, and I didn't want that. I went in and Pop said, "What's a professional man like you doing in a place like this, Mr John Delevan?" and I told him what I'd done and he said, "You made a bet and already you have got your head set to the idea you've lost it." "If I do lose it," I said, "I want to make sure I don't lose anything else." 'That made him laugh. "I respect a wise man," he said. "I reckon I can trust you. If the Celtics win, you come see me. I'll take care of you. You got an honest face.' 'And that was all?' Kevin asked. In eighthgrade math, they had done a unit on loans, and he still remembered most of it. 'He didn't ask for any, uh, collateral?' 'People who go to Pop don't have collateral,' his father said. 'He's not a loanshark like you see in the movies; he doesn't break any legs if you don't pay up. But he has ways of fixing people.' 'What ways?' 'Never mind,' John Delevan said. 'After that last game ended, I went upstairs to tell your mother I was going to go out for cigarettes  again. She was asleep, though, so I was spared that lie. It was late, late for Castle Rock, anyway, going on eleven, but the lights were on in his place. I knew they would be. He gave me the money in tens. He took them out of an old Crisco can. All tens. I remember that. They were crumpled but he had made them straight. Forty tendollar bills, him counting them out like a bankclerk with that pipe going and his glasses up on his head and for just a second there I felt like knocking his teeth out. Instead I thanked him. You don't know how hard it can be to say thank you sometimes. I hope you never do. He said, "You understand the terms, now, don't you?" and I said I did, and he said, "That's good. I ain't worried about you. What I mean to say is you got an honest face. You go on and take care of your business with that fella at work, and then take care of your business with me. And don't make any more bets. Man only has to look in your face to see you weren't cut out to be a gambler. " So I took the money and went home and put it under the floormat of the old Chevy and lay next to your mother and didn't sleep a wink all night long because I felt filthy. Next day I gave the tens to the engineer I bet with, and he counted them out, and then he just folded them over and tucked them into one of his shirt pockets and buttoned the flap like that cash didn't mean any more than a gas receipt he'd have to turn in to the chief contractor at the end of the day. Then he clapped me on the shoulder and said, "Well, you're a good man, Johnny. Better than I thought. I won four hundred but I lost twenty to Bill Untermeyer. He bet you'd come up with the dough first thing this morning and I bet him I wouldn't see it till the end of the week. If I ever did." "I pay my debts," I said. "Easy, now," he said, and clapped me on the shoulder again, and I think that time I really did come close to popping his eyeballs out with my thumbs.' 'How much interest did Pop charge you, Dad?' His father looked at him sharply. 'Does he let you call him that?' 'Yeah, why?' 'Watch out for him, then,' Mr Delevan said. 'He's a snake.' Then he sighed, as if admitting to both of them that he was begging the question, and knew it. 'Ten per cent. That's what the interest was.' 'That's not so m ' 'Compounded weekly,' Mr Delevan added. Kevin sat struck dumb for a moment. Then 'But that's not legal!' 'How true,' Mr Delevan said dryly. He looked at the strained expression of incredulity on his son's face and his own strained look broke. He laughed and clapped his son on the shoulder. 'It's only the world, Kev,' he said. 'It kills us all in the end, anyhow.' 'But ' 'But nothing. That was the freight, and he knew I'd pay it. I knew they were hiring on the threetoeleven shift at the mill over in Oxford. I told you I'd gotten myself ready to lose, and going to Pop wasn't the only thing I did. I'd talked to your mother, said I might take a shift over there for awhile. After all, she'd been wanting a newer car, and maybe to move to a better apartment, and get a little something into the bank in case we had some kind of financial setback.' He laughed. 'Well, the financial setback had happened, and she didn't know it, and I meant to do my damnedest to keep her from finding out. I didn't know if I could or not, but I meant to do my damnedest. She was dead set against it. She said I'd kill myself, working sixteen hours a day. She said those mills were dangerous, you were always reading about someone losing an arm or leg or even getting crushed to death under the rollers. I told her not to worry, I'd get a job in the sorting room, minimum wage but sitdown job, and if it really was too much, I'd give it up. She was still against it. She said she'd go to work herself, but I talked her out of that. That was the last thing I wanted, you know.' Kevin nodded. 'I told her I'd quit in six months, eight at the outside, anyway. So I went up and they hired me on, but not in the sorting room. I got a job in the rolling shed, feeding raw stock into a machine that looked like the wringer on a giant's washing machine. It was dangerous work, all right; if you slipped or if your attention wandered  and it was hard to keep that from happening because it was so damned monotonous  you'd lose part of yourself or all of it. I saw a man lose his hand in a roller once and I never want to see anything like that again. It was like watching a charge of dynamite go off in a rubber glove stuffed with meat.' 'Goddamn,' Kevin said. He had rarely said that in his father's presence, but his father did not seem to notice. 'Anyway, I got two dollars and eighty cents an hour, and after two months they bumped me to three ten,' he said. 'It was hell. I'd work on the road project all day long  at least it was early spring and not hot  and then race off to the mill, pushing that Chevy for all it was worth to keep from being late. I'd take off my khakis and just about jump into a pair of bluejeans and a teeshirt and work the rollers from three until eleven. I'd get home around midnight and the worst part was the nights when your mother waited up  which she did two or three nights a week  and I'd have to act cheery and full of pep when I could hardly walk a straight line, I was so tired. But if she'd seen that ' 'She would have made you stop.' 'Yes. She would. So I'd act bright and chipper and tell her funny stories about the sorting room where I wasn't working and sometimes I'd wonder what would happen if she ever decided to drive up some night to give me a hot dinner, or something like that. I did a pretty good job, but some of it must have showed, because she kept telling me I was silly to be knocking myself out for so little  and it really did seem like chickenfeed once the government dipped their beak and Pop dipped his. It seemed like just about what a fellow working in the sorting room for minimum wage would clear. They paid Wednesday afternoons, and I always made sure to cash my check in the office before the girls went home. 'Your mother never saw one of those checks. 'The first week I paid Pop fifty dollars  forty was interest, and ten was on the four hundred, which left three hundred and ninety owing. I was like a walking zombie. On the road job I'd sit in my car at lunch, eat my sandwich, and then sleep until the foreman rang his goddamned bell. I hated that bell. 'I paid him fifty dollars the second week  thirtynine was interest, eleven was on the principal  and I had it down to three hundred and seventynine dollars. I felt like a bird trying to eat a mountain one peck at a time. 'The third week I almost went into the roller myself, and it scared me so bad I woke up for a few minutes  enough to have an idea, anyway, so I guess it was a blessing in disguise. I had to give up smoking. I couldn't understand why I hadn't seen it before. In those days a pack of smokes cost forty cents. I smoked two packs a day. That was five dollars and sixty cents a week! 'We had a cigarette break every two hours and I looked at my pack of Tareytons and saw I had ten, maybe twelve. I made those cigarettes last a week and a half, and I never bought another pack. 'I spent a month not knowing if I could make it or not. There were days when the alarm went off at six o'clock and I knew I couldn't, that I'd just have to tell Mary and take whatever she wanted to dish out. But by the time the second month started, I knew I was probably going to be all right. I think to this day it was the extra five sixty a week  that, and all the returnable beer and soda bottles I could pick up along the sides of the road  that made the difference. I had the principal down to three hundred, and that meant I could knock off twentyfive, twentysix dollars a week from it, more as time went on. 'Then, in late April, we finished the road project and got a week off, with pay. I told Mary I was getting ready to quit my job at the mill and she said thank God, and I spent that week off from my regular job working all the hours I could get at the mill, because it was time and a half. I never had an accident. I saw them, saw men fresher and more awake than I was have them, but I never did. I don't know why. At the end of that week I gave Pop Merrill a hundred dollars and gave my week's notice at the paper mill. After that last week I had whittled the nut down enough so I could chip the rest off my regular paycheck without your mother noticing.' He fetched a deep sigh. 'Now you know how I know Pop Merrill, and why I don't trust him. I spent ten weeks in hell and he reaped the sweat off my forehead and my ass, too, in tendollar bills that he undoubtedly took out of that Crisco can or another one and passed on to some other sad sack who had got himself in the same kind of mess I did.' 'Boy, you must hate him.' 'No,' Mr Delevan said, getting up. 'I don't hate him and I don't hate myself. I got a fever, that's all. It could have been worse. My marriage could have died of it, and you and Meg never would have been born ' Kevin. Or I might have died of it myself. Pop Merrill was the cure. He was a hard cure, but he worked. What's hard to forgive is how he worked. He took every damned cent and wrote it down in a book in a drawer under his cash register and looked at the circles under my eyes and the way my pants had gotten a way of hanging off my hipbones and he said nothing.' They walked toward the Emporium Galorium, which was painted the dusty faded yellow of signs left too long in country store windows, its false front both obvious and unapologetic. Next to it, Polly Chalmers was sweeping her walk and talking to Alan Pangborn, the county sheriff. She looked young and fresh with her hair pulled back in a horsetail; he looked young and heroic in his neatly pressed uniform. But things were not always the way they looked; even Kevin, at fifteen, knew that. Sheriff Pangborn had lost his wife and youngest son in a car accident that spring, and Kevin had heard that Ms Chalmers, young or not, had a bad case of arthritis and might be crippled up with it before too many more years passed. Things were not always the way they looked. This thought caused him to glance toward the Emporium Galorium again ... and then to look down at his birthday camera, which he was carrying in his hand. 'He even did me a favor,' Mr Delevan mused. 'He got me to quit smoking. But I don't trust him. Walk careful around him, Kevin. And no matter what, let me do the talking. I might know him a little better now.' So they went into the dusty ticking silence, where Pop Merrill waited for them by the door, with his glasses propped on the bald dome of his head and a trick or two still up his sleeve. CHAPTER 6 'Well, and here you are, father and son,' Pop said, giving them an admiring, grandfatherly smile. His eyes twinkled behind a haze of pipesmoke and for a moment, although he was cleanshaven, Kevin thought Pop looked like Father Christmas. 'You've got a fine boy, Mr Delevan. Fine.' 'I know,' Mr Delevan said. 'I was upset when I heard he'd been dealing with you because I want him to stay that way.' 'That's hard,' Pop said, with the faintest touch of reproach. 'That's hard comin from a man who when he had nowhere else to turn 'That's over,' Mr Delevan said. 'Ayuh, ayuh, that's just what I mean to say.' 'But this isn't.' 'It will be,' Pop said. He held a hand out to Kevin and Kevin gave him the Sun camera. 'It will be today.' He held the camera up, turning it over in his hands. 'This is a piece of work. What kind of piece I don't know, but your boy wants to smash it because he thinks it's dangerous. I think he's right. But I told him, "You don't want your daddy to think you're a sissy, do you?" That's the only reason I had him ho you down here, John ' 'I liked "Mr Delevan" better.' 'All right,' Pop said, and sighed. 'I can see you ain't gonna warm up none and let bygones be bygones.' 'No.' Kevin looked from one man to the other, his face distressed. 'Well, it don't matter,' Pop said; both his voice and face went cold with remarkable suddenness, and he didn't look like Father Christmas at all. 'When I said the past is the past and what's done is done, I meant it ... except when it affects what people do in the here and now. But I'm gonna say this, Mr Delevan I don't bottom deal, and you know it.' Pop delivered this magnificent lie with such flat coldness that both of them believed it; Mr Delevan even felt a little ashamed of himself, as incredible as that was. 'Our business was our business. You told me what you wanted, I told you what I'd have to have in return, and you give it to me, and there was an end to it. This is another thing.' And then Pop told a lie even more magnificent, a he which was simply too towering to be disbelieved. 'I got no stake in this, Mr Delevan. There is nothing I want but to help your boy. I like him.' He smiled and Father Christmas was back so fast and strong that Kevin forgot he had ever been gone. Yet more than this John Delevan, who had for months worked himself to the edge of exhaustion and perhaps even death between the rollers in order to pay the exorbitant price this man demanded to atone for a momentary lapse into insanity  John Delevan forgot that other expression, too. Pop led them along the twisting aisles, through the smell of dead newsprint and past the ticktock clocks, and he put the Sun 660 casually down on the worktable a little too near the edge (just as Kevin had done in his own house after taking that first picture) and then just went on toward the stairs at the back which led up to his little apartment. There was a dusty old mirror propped against the wall back there, and Pop looked into it, watching to see if the boy or his father would pick the camera up or move it further away from the edge. He didn't think either would, but it was possible. They spared it not so much as a passing glance and as Pop led them up the narrow stairway with the ancient eroded rubber treads he grinned in a way it would have been bad business for anyone to see and thought, Damn, I'm good! He opened the door and they went into the apartment. Neither John nor Kevin Delevan had ever been in Pop's private quarters, and John knew of no one who had. In a way this was not surprising; no one was ever going to nominate Pop as the town's numberone citizen. John thought it was not impossible that the old fuck had a friend or two  the world never exhausted its oddities, it seemed  but if so, he didn't know who they were. And Kevin spared a fleeting thought for Mr Baker, his favorite teacher. He wondered if, perchance, Mr Baker had ever gotten into the sort of crack he'd need a fellow like Pop to get him out of. This seemed as unlikely to him as the idea of Pop having friends seemed to his father ... but then, an hour ago the idea that his own father ... Well. It was best let go, perhaps. Pop did have a friend (or at least an acquaintance) or two, but he didn't bring them here. He didn't want to. It was his place, and it came closer to revealing his true nature than he wanted anyone to see. It struggled to be neat and couldn't get there. The wallpaper was marked with waterstains; they weren't glaring, but stealthy and brown, like the phantom thoughts that trouble anxious minds. There were crusty dishes in the oldfashioned deep sink, and although the table was clean and the lid on the plastic wastecan was shut, there was an odor of sardines and something else  unwashed feet, maybe  which was almost not there. An odor as stealthy as the waterstains on the wallpaper. The living room was tiny. Here the smell was not of sardines and (maybe) feet but of old pipesmoke. Two windows looked out on nothing more scenic than the alley that ran behind Mulberry Street, and while their panes showed some signs of having been washed  at least swiped at occasionally  the corners were bleared and greasy with years of condensed smoke. The whole place had an air of nasty things swept under the faded hooked rugs and hidden beneath the oldfashioned, overstuffed easychair and sofa. Both of these articles were light green, and your eye wanted to tell you they matched but couldn't, because they didn't. Not quite. The only new things in the room were a large Mitsubishi television with a twentyfiveinch screen and a VCR on the endtable beside it. To the left of the endtable was a rack which caught Kevin's eye because it was totally empty. Pop had thought it best to put the better than seventy fuckmovies he owned in the closet for the time being. One video cassette rested on top of the television in an unmarked case.


'Sit down,' Pop said, gesturing at the lumpy couch. He went over to the TV and slipped the cassette out of its case. Mr Delevan looked at the couch with a momentary expression of doubt, as if he thought it might have bugs, and then sat down gingerly. Kevin sat beside him. The fear was back, stronger than ever. Pop turned on the VCR, slid the cassette in, and then pushed the carriage down. 'I know a fellow up the city,' he began (to residents of Castle Rock and its neighboring towns, 'up the city' always meant Lewiston), 'who's run a camera store for twenty years or so. He got into the VCR business as soon as it started up, said it was going to be the wave of the future. He wanted me to go halves with him, but I thought he was nuts. Well, I was wrong on that one, is what I mean to say, but ' 'Get to the point,' Kevin's father said. 'I'm tryin,' Pop said, wideeyed and injured. 'If you'll let me.' Kevin pushed his elbow gently against his father's side, and Mr Delevan said no more. 'Anyway, a couple of years ago he found out rentin tapes for folks to watch wasn't the only way to make money with these gadgets. If you was willing to lay out as little as eight hundred bucks, you could take people's movies and snapshots and put em on a tape for em. Lots easier to watch.' Kevin made a little involuntary noise and Pop smiled and nodded. 'Ayuh. You took fiftyeight pitchers with that camera of yours, and we all saw each one was a little different than the last one, and I guess we knew what it meant, but I wanted to see for myself. You don't have to be from Missouri to say show me, is what I mean to say.' 'You tried to make a movie out of those snapshots?' Mr Delevan asked. 'Didn't try,' Pop said. 'Did. Or rather, the fella I know up the city did. But it was my idea.' 'Is it a movie?' Kevin asked. He understood what Pop had done, and part of him was even chagrined that he hadn't thought of it himself, but mostly he was awash in wonder (and delight) at the idea. 'Look for yourself,' Pop said, and turned on the TV. 'Fiftyeight pitchers. When this fella does snapshots for folks, he generally videotapes each one for five seconds  long enough to get a good look, he says, but not long enough to get bored before you go on to the next one. I told him I wanted each of these on for just a single second, and to run them right together with no fades.' Kevin remembered a game he used to play in grade school when he had finished some lesson and had free time before the next one began. He had a little dime pad of paper which was called a RainBo Skool Pad because there would be thirty pages of little yellow sheets, then thirty pages of little pink sheets, then thirty pages of green, and so on. To play the game, you went to the very last page and at the bottom you drew a stickman wearing baggy shorts and holding his arms out. On the next page you drew the same stickman in the same place and wearing the same baggy shorts, only this time you drew his arms further up ... but just a little bit. You did that on every page until the arms came together over the stickman's head. Then, if you still had time, you went on drawing the stickman, but now with the arms going down. And if you flipped the pages very fast when you were done, you had a crude sort of cartoon which showed a boxer celebrating a KO he raised his hands over his head, clasped them, shook them, lowered them. He shivered. His father looked at him. Kevin shook his head and murmured, 'Nothing.' 'So what I mean to say is the tape only runs about a minute,' Pop said. 'You got to look close. Ready?' No, Kevin thought. 'I guess so,' Mr Delevan said. He was still trying to sound grumpy and putout, but Kevin could tell he had gotten interested in spite of himself. 'Okay,' Pop Merrill said, and pushed the PLAY button. Kevin told himself over and over again that it was stupid to feel scared. He told himself this and it didn't do a single bit of good. He knew what he was going to see, because he and Meg had both noticed the Sun was doing something besides simply reproducing the same image over and over, like a photocopier; it did not take long for them to realize that the photographs were expressing movement from one to the next. 'Look,' Meg had said. 'The dog's moving!' Instead of responding with one of the friendlybutirritating wisecracks he usually reserved for his little sister, Kevin had said, 'It does look like it ... but you can't tell for sure, Meg.' 'Yes, you can,' she said. They were in his room, where he had been morosely looking at the camera. It sat on the middle of his desk with his new schoolbooks, which he had been meaning to cover, pushed to one side. Meg had bent the gooseneck of his studylamp so it shone a bright circle of light on the middle of his desk blotter. She moved the camera aside and put the first picture  the one with the dab of cakefrosting on it  in the center of the light. 'Count the fenceposts between the dog's behind and the righthand edge of the picture,' she said. 'Those are pickets, not fenceposts,' he told her. 'Like what you do when your nose goes on strike.' 'Haha. Count them.' He did. He could see four, and part of a fifth, although the dog's scraggly hindquarters obscured most of that one. 'Now look at this one.' She put the fourth Polaroid in front of him. Now he could see all of the fifth picket, and part of a sixth. So he knew  or believed  he was going to see a cross between a very old cartoon and one of those 'flipbooks' he used to make in grammar school when the time weighed heavy on his hands. The last twentyfive seconds of the tape were indeed like that, although, Kevin thought, the flipbooks he had drawn in the second grade were really better ... the perceived action of the boxer raising and lowering his hands smoother. In the last twentyfive seconds of the videotape the action moved in rams and jerks which made the old Keystone Kops silent films look like marvels of modern filmmaking in comparison. Still, the key word was action, and it held all of them  even Pop  spellbound. They watched the minute of footage three times without saying a word. There was no sound but breathing Kevin's fast and smooth through his nose, his father's deeper, Pop's a phlegmy rattle in his narrow chest. And the first thirty seconds or so ... He had expected action, he supposed; there was action in the flipbooks, and there was action in the Saturdaymorning cartoons, which were just a slightly more sophisticated version of the flipbooks, but what he had not expected was that for the first thirty seconds of the tape it wasn't like watching notebook pages rapidly thumbed or even a primitive cartoon like Possible Possum on TV for thirty seconds (twentyeight, anyway), his single Polaroid photographs looked eerily like a real movie. Not a Hollywood movie, of course, not even a lowbudget horror movie of the sort Megan sometimes pestered him to rent for their own VCR when their mother and father went out for the evening; it was more like a snippet of home movie made by someone who has just gotten an eightmillimeter camera and doesn't know how to use it very well yet. In those first twentyeight seconds, the black nobreed dog walked with barely perceptible jerks along the fence, exposing five, six, seven pickets; it even paused to sniff a second time at one of them, apparently reading another of those canine telegrams. Then it walked on, head down and toward the fence, hindquarters switched out toward the camera. And, halfway through this first part, Kevin noted something else he hadn't seen before the photographer had apparently swung his camera to keep the dog in the frame. If he (or she) hadn't done so, the dog would have simply walked out of the picture, leaving nothing to look at but the fence. The pickets at the far right of the first two or three photographs disappeared beyond the righthand border of the picture and new pickets appeared at the left. You could tell, because the tip of one of those two rightmost pickets had been broken off. Now it was no longer in the frame. The dog started to sniff again ... and then its head came up. Its good ear stiffened; the one which had been slashed and laid limp in some longago fight tried to do the same. There was no sound, but Kevin felt with a certainty beyond repudiation that the dog had begun to growl. The dog had sensed something or someone. What or who? Kevin looked at the shadow they had at first dismissed as the branch of a tree or maybe a phonepole and knew. Its head began to turn ... and that was when the second half of this strange 'film' began, thirty seconds of snapjerk action that made your head ache and your eyeballs hot. Pop had had a hunch, Kevin thought, or maybe he had even read about something like this before. Either way, it had proved out and was too obvious to need stating. With the pictures taken quite closely together, if not exactly one after another, the action in the makeshift 'movie' almost flowed. Not quite, but almost. But when the time between photographs was spaced, what they were watching became something that nauseated your eye because it wanted to see either a moving picture or a series of still photographs and instead it saw both and neither. Time was passing in that flat Polaroid world. Not at the same speed it passed in this (real?) one, or the sun would have come up (or gone down) over there three times already and whatever the dog was going to do would be done (if it had something to do), and if it did not, it would just be gone and there would be only the moveless and seemingly eternal eroded picket fence guarding the listless patch of lawn, but it was passing. The dog's head was coming around to face the photographer, owner of the shadow, like the head of a dog in the grip of a fit at one moment the face and even the shape of the head was obscured by that floppy ear; then you saw one blackbrown eye enclosed by a round and somehow mucky corona that made Kevin think of a spoiled eggwhite; then you saw half the muzzle with the lips appearing slightly wrinkled, as if the dog were getting ready to bark or growl; and last of all you saw threequarters of a face somehow more awful than the face of any mere dog had a right to be, even a mean one. The white spackles along its muzzle suggested it was no longer young. At the very end of the tape you saw the dog's lips were indeed pulling back. There was one blink of white Kevin thought was a tooth. He didn't see that until the third runthrough. It was the eye that held him. It was homicidal. This breedless dog almost screamed rogue. And it was nameless; he knew that, as well. He knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that no Polaroid man or Polaroid woman or Polaroid child had ever named that Polaroid dog; it was a stray, born stray, raised stray, grown old and mean stray, the avatar of all the dogs who had ever wandered the world, unnamed and unhomed, killing chickens, eating garbage out of the cans they had long since learned to knock over, sleeping in culverts and beneath the porches of deserted houses. Its wits would be dim, but its instincts would be sharp and red. It .. When Pop Merrill spoke, Kevin was so deeply and fundamentally startled out of his thoughts that he nearly screamed. 'The man who took those pitchers,' he said. 'If there was a person, is what I mean to say. What do you suppose happened to him?' Pop had frozen the last frame with his remote control. A line of static ran through the picture. Kevin wished it ran through the dog's eye, but the line was below it. That eye stared out at them, baleful, stupidly murderous  no, not stupidly, not entirely, that was what made it not merely frightening but terrifying and no one needed to answer Pop's question. You needed no more pictures to understand what was going to happen next. The dog had perhaps heard something of course it had, and Kevin knew what. It had heard that squidgy little whine. Further pictures would show it continuing to turn, and then beginning to fill more and more of each frame until there was nothing to see but dog  no listless patchy lawn, no fence, no sidewalk, no shadow. Just the dog. Who meant to attack. Who meant to kill, if it could. Kevin's dry voice seemed to be coming from someone else. 'I don't think it likes getting its picture taken,' he said. Pop's short laugh was like a bunch of dry twigs broken over a knee for kindling. 'Rewind it,' Mr Delevan said. 'You want to see the whole thing again?' Pop asked. 'No  just the last ten seconds or so.' Pop used the remote control to go back, then ran it again. The dog turned its head, as jerky as a robot which is old and running down but still dangerous, and Kevin wanted to tell them, Stop now. Just stop. That's enough. Just stop and let's break the camera. Because there was something else, wasn't there? Something he didn't want to think about but soon would, like it or not; he could feel it breaching in his mind like the broad back of a whale. 'Once more,' Mr Delevan said. 'Frame by frame this time. Can you do that?' 'Ayuh,' Pop said. 'Goddam machine does everything but the laundry.' This time one frame, one picture, at a time. It was not like a robot now, or not exactly, but like some weird clock, something that belonged with Pop's other specimens downstairs. jerk. Jerk. Jerk. The head coming around. Soon they would be faced by that merciless, notquiteidiotic eye again. 'What's that?' Mr Delevan asked. 'What's what?' Pop asked, as if he didn't know it was the thing the boy hadn't wanted to talk about the other day, the thing, he was convinced, that had made up the boy's mind about destroying the camera once and for all. 'Underneath its neck,' Mr Delevan said, and pointed. 'It's not wearing a collar or a tag, but it's got something around its neck on a string or a thin rope.' 'I dunno,' Pop said imperturbably. 'Maybe your boy does. Young folks have sharper eyes than us old fellas.' Mr Delevan turned to look at Kevin. 'Can you make it out?' He fell silent. 'It's really small.' His mind returned to what his father had said when they were leaving the house. If she never asks you, you never have to tell her ... That's lust the way we do things in the grownup world. Just now he had asked Kevin if he could make out what that thing under the dog's neck was. Kevin hadn't really answered that question; he had said something else altogether. It's really small. And it was. The fact that he knew what it was in spite of that ... well ... What had his father called it? Skating up to the edge of a lie? And he couldn't actually see it. Not actually. just the same, he knew. The eye only suggested; the heart understood. just as his heart understood that, if he was right, the camera must be destroyed. Must be. At that moment, Pop Merrill was suddenly struck by an agreeable inspiration. He got up and snapped off the TV. 'I've got the pitchers downstairs,' he said. 'Brought em back with the videotape. I seen that thing m'self, and ran my magnifying glass over it, but still couldn't tell ... but it does look familiar, God cuss it. just let me go get the pitchers and m'glass.' 'We might as well go down with you,' Kevin said, which was the last thing in the world Pop wanted, but then Delevan stepped in, God bless him, and said he might like to look at the tape again after they looked at the last couple of pictures under the magnifying glass. 'Won't take a minute,' Pop said, and was gone, sprightly as a bird hopping from twig to twig on an apple tree, before either of them could have protested, if either had had a mind to. Kevin did not. That thought had finally breached its monstrous back in his mind, and, like it or not, he was forced to contemplate it. It was simple, as a whale's back is simple  at least to the eye of one who does not study whales for a living  and it was colossal in the same way. It wasn't an idea but a simple certainty. It had to do with that odd flatness Polaroids always seemed to have, with the way they showed you things only in two dimensions, although all photographs did that; it was that other photographs seemed to at least suggest a third dimension, even those taken with a simple Kodak 110. The things in his photographs, photographs which showed things he had never seen through the Sun's viewfinder or anywhere else, for that matter, were that same way flatly, unapologetically twodimensional. Except for the dog. The dog wasn't flat. The dog wasn't meaningless, a thing you could recognize but which had no emotional impact. The dog not only seemed to suggest three dimensions but to really have them, the way a hologram seems to really have them, or one of those 3D movies where you had to wear special glasses to reconcile the double images. It's not a Polaroid dog, Kevin thought, and it doesn't belong in the world Polaroids take pictures of. That's crazy, I know it is, but I also know it's true. So what does it mean? Why is my camera taking pictures of it over and over ... and what Polaroid man or Polaroid woman is snapping pictures of It? Does he or she even see it? If it is a threedimensional dog in a twodimensional world, maybe he or she doesn't see it ... can't see it. They say for us time is the fourth dimension, and we know it's there, but we can't see it. We can't even really feel it pass, although sometimes, especially when we're bored, I guess, it seems like we can. But when you got right down to it, all that might not even matter, and the questions were far too tough for him, anyway. There were other questions that seemed more important to him, vital questions, maybe even mortal ones. Like why was the dog in his camera? Did it want something of him, or just of anybody? At first he had thought the Answer was anybody, anybody would do because anybody could take pictures of it and the movement always advanced. But the thing around its neck, that thing that wasn't a collar ... that had to do with him, Kevin Delevan, and nobody else. Did it want to do something to him? If the answer to that question was yes, you could forget all the other ones, because it was pretty goddamned obvious what the dog wanted to do. It was in its murky eye, in the snarl you could just see beginning. He thought it wanted two things. First to escape. Then to kill. There's a man or woman over there with a camera who maybe doesn't even see that dog, Kevin thought, and if the photographer can't see the dog, maybe the dog can't see the photographer, and so the photographer is safe. But if the dog really is threedimensional, maybe he sees out  maybe he sees whoever is using my camera. Maybe it's still not me, or not specifically me; maybe whoever is using the camera is its target. Still  the thing it was wearing around its neck. What about that? He thought of the cur's dark eyes, saved from stupidity by a single malevolent spark. God knew how the dog had gotten into that Polaroid world in the first place, but when its picture was taken, it could see out, and it wanted to get out, and Kevin believed in his heart that it wanted to kill him first, the thing it was wearing around its neck said it wanted to kill him first, proclaimed that it wanted to kill him first, but after that? Why, after Kevin, anyone would do. Anyone at all. In a way it was like another game you played when you were a little kid, wasn't it? It was like Giant Step. The dog had been walking along the fence. The dog had heard the Polaroid, that squidgy little whine. It turned, and saw ... what? Its own world or universe? A world or universe enough like its own so it saw or sensed it could or at least might be able to live and hunt here? It didn't matter. Now, every time someone took a picture of it, the dog would get closer. It would get closer and closer until ... well, until what? Until it burst through, somehow? 'That's stupid,' he muttered. 'It'd never fit.' 'What?' his father asked, roused from his own musings. 'Nothing,' Kevin said. 'I was just talking to myse ' Then, from downstairs, muffled but audible, they heard Pop Merrill cry out in mingled dismay, irritation, and surprise 'Well shit fire and save matches! Goddammit!' Kevin and his father looked at each other, startled. 'Let's go see what happened,' his father said, and got up. 'I hope he didn't fall down and break his arm, or something. I mean, part of me does hope it, but ... you know.' Kevin thought What if he's been taking pictures? What if that dog's down there? It hadn't sounded like fear in the old man's voice, and of course there really was no way a dog that looked as big as a mediumsized German shepherd could come through either a camera the size of the Sun 660 or one of the prints it made. You might as well try to drag a washing machine through a knothole. Still, he felt fear enough for both of them  for all three of them  as he followed his father back down the stairs to the gloomy bazaar below. Going down the stairs, Pop Merrill was as happy as a clam at high tide. He had been prepared to make the switch right in front of them if he had to. Might have been a problem if it had just been the boy, who was still a year or so away from thinking he knew everything, but the boy's dad  ah, fooling that fine fellow would have been like stealing a bottle from a baby. Had he told the boy about the jam he'd gotten into that time? From the way the boy looked at him  a new, cautious way  Pop thought Delevan probably had. And what else had the father told the son? Well, let's see. Does he let you call him Pop? That means he's planning to pull a fast one on you. That was for starters. He's a lowdown snake in the grass, son. That was for seconds. And, of course, there was the prize of them all Let me do the talking, boy. I know him better than you do. You just let me handle everything. Men like Delevan were to Pop Merrill what a nice platter of fried chicken was to some folks  tender, tasty, juicy, and all but falling off the bone. Once Delevan had been little more than a kid himself, and he would never fully understand that it wasn't Pop who had stuck his tit in the wringer but he himself. The man could have gone to his wife and she would have tapped that old biddy aunt of hers whose tight little ass was lined with hundreddollar bills, and Delevan would have spent some time in the doghouse, but she would have let him out in time. He not only hadn't seen it that way; he hadn't seen it at all. And now, for no reason but idiot time, which came and went without any help from anyone, he thought he knew all there was to know about Reginald Marion Merrill. Which was just the way Pop liked it. Why, he could have swapped one camera for the other right in front of the man instead and Delevan never would have seen a goddamned thing  that was how sure he was he had old Pop figured out. But this was better. You never ever asked Lady Luck for a date; she had a way of standing men up just when they needed her the most. But if she showed up on her own ... well, it was wise to drop whatever it was you were doing and take her out and wine her and dine her just as lavishly as you could. That was one bitch who always put out if you treated her right. So he went quickly to the worktable, bent, and extracted the Polaroid 660 with the broken lens from the shadows underneath. He put it on the table, fished a keyring from his pocket (with one quick glance over his shoulder to be sure neither of them had decided to come down after all), and selected the small key which opened the locked drawer that formed the entire left side of the table. In this deep drawer were a number of gold Krugerrands; a stamp album in which the least valuable stamp was worth six hundred dollars in the latest Scott Stamp Catalogue; a coin collection worth approximately nineteen thousand dollars; two dozen glossy photographs of a blearyeyed woman having sexual congress with a Shetland pony; and an amount of cash totalling just over two thousand dollars. The cash, which he stowed in a variety of tin cans, was Pop's loanout money. John Delevan would have recognized the bills. They were all crumpled tens. Pop deposited Kevin's Sun 660 in this drawer, locked it, and put his keyring back in his pocket. Then he pushed the camera with the broken lens off the edge of the worktable (again) and cried out 'Well shit fire and save matches! Goddammit!' loud enough for them to hear. Then he arranged his face in the proper expression of dismay and chagrin and waited for them to come running to see what had happened. 'Pop?' Kevin cried. 'Mr Merrill? Are you okay?' 'Ayuh,' he said. 'Didn't hurt nothin but my goddam pride. That camera's just bad luck, I guess. I bent over to open the tooldrawer, is what I mean to say, and I knocked the fuckin thing right off onto the floor. Only I guess it didn't come through s'well this time. I dunno if I should say I'm sorry or not. I mean, you was gonna ' He held the camera apologetically out to Kevin, who took it, looked at the broken lens and shattered plastic of the housing around it. 'No, it's okay,' Kevin told him, turning the camera over in his hands  but he did not handle it in the same gingerly, tentative way he had before as if it might really be constructed not of plastic and glass but some sort of explosive. 'I meant to bust it up, anyhow.' 'Guess I saved you the trouble.' 'I'd feel better ' Kevin began. 'Ayuh, ayuh. I feel the same way about mice. Laugh if you want to, but when I catch one in a trap and it's dead, I beat it with a broom anyway. just to be sure, is what I mean to say.' Kevin smiled faintly, then looked at his father. 'He said he's got a chopping block out back, Dad ' 'Got a pretty good sledge in the shed, too, if ain't nobody took it.' 'Do you mind, Dad?' 'It's your camera, Kev,' Delevan said. He flicked a distrustful glance at Pop, but it was a glance that said he distrusted Pop on general principles, and not for any specific reason. 'But if it will make you feel any better, I think it's the right decision.' 'Good,' Kevin said. He felt a tremendous weight go off his shoulders  no, it was from his heart that the weight was lifted. With the lens broken, the camera was surely useless ... but he wouldn't feel really at ease until he saw it in fragments around Pop's chopping block. He turned it over in his hands, front to back and back to front, amused and amazed at how much he liked the broken way it looked and felt. 'I think I owe you the cost of that camera, Delevan,' Pop said, knowing exactly how the man would respond. 'No,' Delevan said. 'Let's smash it and forget this whole crazy thing ever hap ' He paused. 'I almost forgot  we were going to look at those last few photos under your magnifying glass. I wanted to see if I could make out the thing that dog's wearing. I keep thinking it looks familiar.' 'We can do that after we get rid of the camera, can't we?' Kevin asked. 'Okay, Dad?' 'Sure.' 'And then,' Pop said, 'it might not be such a bad idea to burn the pitchers themselves. You could do it right in my stove.' 'I think that's a great idea,' Kevin said. 'What do you think, Dad?' 'I think Mrs Merrill never raised any fools,' his father said. 'Well,' Pop said, smiling enigmatically from behind folds of rising blue smoke, 'there was five of us, you know.' The day had been bright blue when Kevin and his father walked down to the Emporium Galorium; a perfect autumn day. Now it was fourthirty, the sky had mostly clouded over, and it looked like it might rain before dark. The first real chill of the fall touched Kevin's hands. It would chap them red if he stayed out long enough, but he had no plans to. His mom would be home in half an hour, and already he wondered what she would say when she saw Dad was with him, and what his dad would say. But that was for later. Kevin set the Sun 660 on the chopping block in the little backyard, and Pop Merrill handed him a sledgehammer. The haft was worn smooth with usage. The head was rusty, as if someone had left it carelessly out in the rain not once or twice but many times. Yet it would do the job, all right. Kevin had no doubt of that. The Polaroid, its lens broken and most of the housing around it shattered as well, looked fragile and defenseless sitting there on the block's chipped, chunked, and splintered surface, where you expected to see a length of ash or maple waiting to be split in two. Kevin set his hands on the sledgehammer's smooth handle and tightened them. 'You're sure, son?' Mr Delevan asked. 'Yes.' 'Okay.' Kevin's father glanced at his own watch. 'Do it, then.' Pop stood to one side with his pipe clamped between his wretched teeth, hands in his back pockets. He looked shrewdly from the boy to the man and then back to the boy, but said nothing. Kevin lifted the sledgehammer and, suddenly surprised by an anger at the camera he hadn't even known he felt, he brought it down with all the force he could muster. Too hard, he thought. You're going to miss it, be lucky not to mash your own foot, and there it will sit, not much more than a piece of hollow plastic a little kid could stomp flat without half trying, and even if you're lucky enough to miss your foot, Pop will look at you. He won't say anything; he won't have to. It'll all be in the way he looks at you. And thought also It doesn't matter if I hit it or not. It's magic, some kind of magic camera, and you CAN'T break it. Even if you hit it dead on the money the sledge will just bounce off it, like bullets off Superman's chest. But then there was no more time to think anything, because the sledge connected squarely with the camera. Kevin really had swung much too hard to maintain anything resembling control, but he got lucky. And the sledgehammer didn't just bounce back up, maybe hitting Kevin square between the eyes and killing him, like the final twist in a horror Story. The Sun didn't so much shatter as detonate. Black plastic flew everywhere. A long rectangle with a shiny black square at one end  a picture which would never be taken, Kevin supposed  fluttered to the bare ground beside the chopping block and lay there, face down. There was a moment of silence so complete they could hear not only the cars on Lower Main Street but kids playing tag half a block away in the parking lot behind Wardell's Country Store, which had gone bankrupt two years before and had stood vacant ever since. 'Well, that's that,' Pop said. 'You swung that sledge just like Paul Bunyan, Kevin! I should smile n kiss a pig if you didn't. 'No need to do that,' he said, now addressing Mr Delevan, who was picking up broken chunks of plastic as prissily as a man picking up the pieces of a glass he has accidentally knocked to the floor and shattered. 'I have a boy comes in and cleans up the yard every week or two. I know it don't look much as it is, but if I didn't have that kid ... Glory!' 'Then maybe we ought to use your magnifying glass and take a look at those pictures,' Mr Delevan said, standing up. He dropped the few pieces of plastic he had picked up into a rusty incinerator that stood nearby and then brushed off his hands. 'Fine by me,' Pop said. 'Then burn them,' Kevin reminded. 'Don't forget that.' 'I didn't,' Pop said. 'I'll feel better when they're gone, too.' 'Jesus!' John Delevan said. He was bending over Pop Merrill's worktable, looking through the lighted magnifying glass at the secondtolast photograph. It was the one in which the object around the dog's neck showed most clearly; in the last photo, the object had swung back in the other direction again. 'Kevin, look at that and tell me if it's what I think it is.' Kevin took the magnifying glass and looked. He had known, of course, but even so it still wasn't a look just for form's sake. Clyde Tombaugh must have looked at an actual photograph of the planet Pluto for the first time with the same fascination.