Four Past Midnight - Stephen King [317]
'I don't know, dear.'
Kevin had picked up the camera in one hand and several of the exposed Polaroids in the other - they had taken almost a dozen in all. 'I'm not so sure I want a refund,' he said.
His father stared at him. 'What? Jesus wept!'
'Well,' Kevin said, a little defensively, 'I'm just saying that maybe we ought to think about it. I mean, it's not exactly an ordinary defect, is it? I mean, if the pictures came out overexposed ... or underexposed ... or just plain blank ... that would be one thing. But how do you get a thing like this? The same picture, over and over? I mean, look! And they're outdoors, even though we took every one of these pictures inside!' 'It's a practical joke,' his father said. 'It must be. The thing to do is just exchange the damned thing and forget about it.'
'I don't think it's a practical joke,' Kevin said. 'First, it's too complicated to be a practical joke. How do you rig a camera to take the same picture over and over? Plus, the psychology is all wrong.'
'Psychology, yet,' Mr Delevan said, rolling his eyes at his wife.
'Yes, psychology!' Kevin replied firmly. 'When a guy loads your cigarette or hands you a stick of pepper gum, he hangs around to watch the fun, doesn't he? But unless you or Mom have been pulling my leg -'
'Your father isn't much of a leg-puller, dear,' Mrs Delevan said, stating the obvious gently.
Mr Delevan was looking at Kevin with his lips pressed together. It was the look he always got when he perceived his son drifting toward that area of the ballpark where Kevin seemed most at home: left field. Far left field. There was a hunchy, intuitive streak in Kevin that had always puzzled and confounded him. He didn't know where it had come from, but he was sure it hadn't been his side of the family.
He sighed and looked at the camera again. A piece of black plastic had been chipped from the left side of the housing, and there was a crack, surely no thicker than a human hair, down the center of the viewfinder lens. The crack was so thin it disappeared completely when you raised the camera to your eye to set the shot you would not get - what you would get was on the coffee table, and there were nearly a dozen other examples in the dining room.
What you got was something that looked like a refugee from the local animal shelter.
'All right, what in the devil are you going to do with it?' he asked. 'I mean, let's think this over reasonably, Kevin. What practical good is a camera that takes the same picture over and over?'
But it was not practical good Kevin was thinking about. In fact, he was not thinking at all. He was feeling ... and remembering. In the instant when he had pushed the shutter release, one clear idea
(it's mine)
had filled his mind as completely as the momentary white flash had filled his eyes. That idea, complete yet somehow inexplicable, had been accompanied by a powerful mixture of emotions which he could still not identify completely ... but he thought fear and excitement had predominated.
And besides - his father always wanted to look at things reasonably. He would never be able to understand Kevin's intuitions or Meg's interest in killer dolls named Chuckie.
Meg came back in with a huge dish of ice cream and started the movie again. Someone was now attempting to toast Chuckie with a blowtorch, but he went right on waving his knife. 'Are you two still arguing?'
'We're having a discussion,' Mr Delevan said. His lips were pressed more tightly together than ever.
'Yeah, right,' Meg said, sitting down on the floor again and crossing her legs. 'You always say that.'
'Meg?' Kevin said kindly.
'What?'
'If you dump that much ice cream on top of a ruptured spleen, you'll die horribly in the night. Of course, your spleen might not actually be ruptured, but -'
Meg stuck her tongue out at him and turned back to the movie.
Mr Delevan was looking at his son with an expression of mingled affection and exasperation. 'Look, Kev - it's your camera. No argument about that. You can do whatever